Mâvarin and Other Inspirations

I confess!

mavarin — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 18:21:04 GMT

Has anyone noticed that I stopped posting my Clarion Write-a-Thon progress on Twitter, LJ and FaceBook? In case you did and were wondering, no, I have not stopped working on my Heirs of Mâvarin edit. I've worked on it every night, albeit for just a few minutes on the night I put together The Messenger for church.

But I stopped reporting my progress because I stopped making progress, in the sense of moving forward from chapter to chapter in my actual edit. Eventually I started over on it. I'm a little embarrassed about that.

The further I got with my attempt to break the novel's chapters into bite sized chunks, the less actual editing I did. I had decided to double back afterward and edit the new, shorter chapters, but I wasn't quite sure where it was that I stopped giving the actual words my full attention. At the same time, I was finding the 10 to 15 page chapter length I had attempted to be unworkable, given the lengths of some scenes and the rhythm of my storytelling.

So I started over, this time shooting for 25 page chapters, more or less. Are the same time I started rereading each chapter and making further edits for length, clarity and to reduce awkwardness in certain passages of dialogue. I'm up to Chapter Six, which was Chapter Nine, and before that Chapter Four. I'm on page 129 right now, but there's no way of knowing what other page numbers have been associated with Shela's revelation that Rani's coin is the one the mages gave King Jor before his kidnapping.

You may think it's silly, all this fussing with chapter lengths. If so, you're probably right. What's more important is, it gives me one last chance to see what can be cut and what can be tweaked, and to get rid of stuff that doesn't quite work, but survives edit after edit because it's so familiar that I don't read each word of it anymore and therefore don't notice. Not this time.

Today is Saturday. I've been working six day weeks for a while, and the seventh, Sunday, is just as busy with all my obligations at church and with two disabled friends. Last Saturday I didn't work, but I drove half an hour across town to renew the dogs' licenses, and later took Pepper in for grooming. Today I don't work, don't have any obligations outside the home. I've got housework to do, but that's it. This is my chance to read through the text with care and comprehension, and fix things that still don't quite work. And yes, I'll be working on chapter lengths at the same time.

No, really it's a good thing. I'm back on track, and I will get this done.

Lest we forget, this Clarion Write-a-Thon isn't just a chance to get me moving again on my fiction. It's also a fundraiser for the Clarion Workshop at UCSD, the current iteration of the sf writers' workshop where I first met John in 1977. Please help support their good work here. I will match each contribution up to $20 per person. Thanks!

Karen

Clarion Write-a-thon Week One Questionnaire

mavarin — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 04:57:22 GMT

From the Clarion Blog comes this Week 1 Writing Challenge for the Clarion Write-a-Thon. Off we go!

For those who do not yet have concrete writing goals of your own, we at the blog would like to offer you up a series of goals to focus you over the summer. Next week Monday through Friday, we’d like you to turn your attention to that novel you’re writing. Not writing one? Well, now you are. As memorable as short stories can be, the economic lifeblood of science fiction, horror and fantasy is the fans’ continuing love affair with novel-length fiction. Whether you do or do not have a novel in the works at this point, this challenge applies to you! Please answer the following questions regarding your novel, and if you’re not too shy or territorial, why not share them with other writers in the comments section? This questionnaire is meant to focus your writing and give you the basic structure that even the most outline-phobic needs to shorten the time between first draft and finished manuscript.

Who is the character whose actions and decisions most drive your novel? (We will call this person the hero.) This is the tricky thing about Heirs of Mâvarin: I have two protagonists, Del and Crel Merden, who share the novel-driving duties more or less equally. They're twins, so it seems like a fair distribution of labor.
Describe your hero in five words or less. Teenage hidden royalty, revealed.
What has to happen for your audience to know that the novel is over? (We will call this the goal.) The twins must reclaim their royal status.
Describe this goal in ten words or less. Survive poisoning and imprisonment, find the King and overcome usurpers.
What is the one most profound or pervasive reason that your hero cannot accomplish the goal right away? (We will call this the primary obstacle.) Most people don't know that the current royal family are impostors.
Describe the primary obstacle in ten words or less. The usurping regime is entrenched; the twins are powerless unknowns.
What person most clearly drives, creates, or causes the primary obstacle? (We will call this person the antagonist.) Archmage Sunestri of Mâton.
Describe your antagonist in five words or less. The power behind two thrones.
Look at the answer to question 2, and find three other sf&f novels whose hero could also be described in these exact or very similar words.* The Secret Country by Pamela Dean, The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis, and Talking to Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede.
Look at the answer to question 4, and find three other sf&f novels whose conflict could be described thus. The Return of the King (sort of) by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis, and Talking to Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede. Well, they're in the neighborhood, anyway.
Look at the answer to question 6, and find three other sf&f novels with the same basic primary obstacle. Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis, The Little Lame Prince by Miss Mulock, and The Hobbit (sort of) by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Look at the answer to question 8, and find three other sf&f novels whose antagonist meets this description. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling, The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien, and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.
Which novels appear more than once in your answers to questions 9-12? List them here by name. The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis, and Talking to Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede. Honorable mention to LotR.
List the ways in which your novel stands in stark contrast to each of the novels listed in question 13. The twins are not known to be hidden or missing because of the impostors who replaced them, and they learn their royal identities early in the book and spend the novel incorporating this change into their lives and personalities, rather than having royalty thrust upon them at the end of the book. And did I mention there are two of them? And that their best friend is a newly-transformed monster?

I see what the thrust of this questionnaire is. The novel is expected to incorporate classic storytelling elements (c.f. the work of Joseph Campbell) and yet not be a knockoff of something else. Yes, I know that. Onward!

Karen

Things I Still Don't Know About Heirs of Mâvarin

mavarin — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 02:36:53 GMT

As The Clarion Write-a-Thon proceeds, and I work on what's meant to be my final edit on my first novel, there are still things I wish I knew:

1. How important is it to have short chapters? I used to have this book broken into chapters that ran from 31 to 51 manuscript pages each. Each chapter had a title reflecting a theme that applied to several scenes in the chapter, sometimes several storylines. But after surveying some of my favorite books, I decided to break my mega-chapters into more bite size chunks. But that ruins, or at least dilutes, my chapter titles and themes organization. Does that matter? Do editors care whether chapters are long or short? Do readers?

2. For that matter, are chapter titles terribly passe and juvenile, even for a YA fantasy?

3. Does it matter that my new chapters average around 11 to 13 pages, but there's an outlier that's 23 pages long?

4. When I finish this edit, where the heck am I going to send it, or a query about it? I've used up most of the major fantasy publishers and more than a few agents in past attempts.

5. If I fail at #4 (i.e. get rejections or no response at all...again), is it time to consider e-publishing?

Karen

Sponsor my Clarion Write-a-Thon efforts here.

More on The Big Bang

mavarin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 07:22:45 GMT

Cribbed from my GB posts other than the one reprinted below:

My pre-review review:
26 Jun 2010, 2:34 pm
Re: Rate / Review "The Big Bang"

I usually wait until I've seen an episode 2 or 3 times before rating, but I have to go photograph a wedding now and won't see it again until tonight. (Bit exciting - never photographed a wedding and I'm not very good with dark interiors.) But there is no question that I was absolutely thrilled with this. 10/10 - and I'll be back later to figure out why.

On the callbacks to The Eleventh Hour in The Big Bang:
Re: Did we see the "totally obvious" thing from The Eleventh Hour?

It's actually a different take of Amelia in the bedroom. I noticed from the way she said the word "emergency."

I think the shadow on TEH could still be the Doctor, and some of the time weirdness in Leadworth could still be due to the crack, even though it wasn't mentioned in TBiBa. Or the Silence. Or.... Back in a moment.

In short, the fact that some things we noticed still don't match up or pay off doesn't mean they won't - next season. And even if they don't, we have enough timey-wimeyness to explain them to ourselves.

On Matt Smith as old man, and the episode's thematic content:

Re: Rate / Review "The Big Bang"

I often think that Matt Smith looks eerily like the old man he's supposed to be. I think it's a combination of the shape of his face, makeup, lighting and great acting. In this one, it's especially evident in the goodbye scene at the Pandorica and the "remember the TARDIS" goodbye scene with Amelia.

And I agree with those who have pointed out the potency of the themes of story and memory, and the use of humorous elements to convey plot points and help create the serious moments.

On paradoxes and the Doctor's predicament:

Re: Rate / Review "The Big Bang"

For what it's worth (and I'll grant you, it's probably not worth much), I find this kind of causal loop/predestination(?) paradox much less troubling than a purely ontological one, of the sort Moffat has employed at least twice before. Even without a starting point, the handing off of the sonic through time to get the Doctor out of the box makes a certain amount of sense. You can trace the loop, and see where and when each piece of it happens, when the Doctor finds out about each element of it, and how each person got the sonic. As long as you don't insist on a starting point (which some do, but perhaps shouldn't) you're sitting pretty.

But consider the multi-award-winning, poll-topping Blink, and the well-regarded Time Crash mini-episode. In the latter, the Doctor "didn't have to" figure out the trick with the Helmic regulator and the Zeiton crystals. He doesn't have to learn how to do the clever thing. He just passes the knowledge from older self to younger self, becomes the older self and fulfills what he already experienced. Somehow, for me, knowledge acquired from nowhere is more problematic than actions with no starting point. Blink is far worse in this respect, with the Doctor reading a transcript of his own words, conveying exactly what he wants to say in the way he way he would normally say it, sounding spontaneous while being anything but. Freaks me out, that does. And yet people love it. Heck, I love it, despite my freakedoutness.

I think if you can buy into those paradoxes, then the one in The Big Bang is relatively easy to cope with. The Doctor is doing stuff out of order, but learning about it in a linear way along his personal timeline. He doesn't do anything until he's found out what to do, even though from the pov of others he's already done it.

The issue I have more trouble with is, why does the rebuilt timeline have no TARDIS or Doctor in it, when both are integral to the survival of the universe several times over? Is the reconstituted universe imperfect in this "small" way, with the Earth being safe from Daleks and Cybermen and Time Lords and Reality Bomb a mere anomalous artifact of what's gone, like Amy's ring before the reboot? After overseeing the explosion that restores everything, why does the Doctor need to slip out of the Universe through the crack in Amelia's wall in order to finish the job? Claims are made about him being necessarily stranded in the void, but I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around the why and how of it. It doesn't begin to ruin the story for me, but I'd love to be able to put this niggle to rest.

My Comments on the DWM 2010 Season Survey

mavarin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 09:16:40 GMT

I've just emailed my Doctor Who Magazine Season Survey, filled out in plenty of time now that I'm a subscriber. (The time lag for DWM to reach U.S. bookstores is pretty horrendous and getting worse!)

Does the body of an email count as "comments on a separate sheet of paper"? Here are mine:

Best Overall Story: Some of my personal ratings have changed since I voted on the Gallifrey Base rate threads, in both directions. I initially liked The Hungry Earth, but the mother's behavior in Cold Blood is so upsettingly awful that I'm unwilling to watch the story as often as I normally would. I've been watching just the last ten minutes of the story, for Rory's death and its aftermath. I initially found it hard to rate The Pandorica Opens at all; I just wasn't sure what I thought or felt about it in advance of The Big Bang. Then I realized I was obsessed with the story. When The Big Bang aired, both parts rated an easy 10 - even if most of the fan theories about Amy's house and other conundrums went unconfirmed (so far!). Victory of the Daleks is destroyed by the premise of sending Spitfires into space with about 10 minutes from theory to launch, along with the lack of even a vague explanation how mention of Dorabella can stop Bracewell from exploding.

Best Writer: Steven Moffat's captivating scripts that bookend the series make him the only choice for this award, and his other two stories are only slightly less successful for me. If I could nominate a runner-up, it would be Richard Curtis, writer of the year's best Who script by someone not nicknamed the Moff (Vincent and the Doctor).

Best Director: This year, the choice of best director is "a tricky one." I gave Toby Haynes the nod for great visuals in several places (especially at the openings and closings of the Pandorica) and for encouraging truly outstanding performances from Matt Smith and Arthur Darvill, enhanced by great choices in lighting, shots used, and music or lack thereof. That said, Catherine Morshead did an outstanding job on Amy's Choice (especially scenes of the frozen TARDIS) and Jonny Campbell painted his own beautiful pictures in Vincent and the Doctor. The scene with Amy and the sunflowers (as opposed to The Sunflowers) was just lovely, as were the field with crows, Vincent's flawlessly-recreated bedroom (with the despairing Vincent on the bed) and the cafe.

Best Actor: Matt Smith utterly deserves the #1 spot in the acting category this year. He's been a revelation, every bit as good as Steven Moffat promised if not better. How can a man that young convey great age so utterly convincingly? He's the world's most graceful klutz, at once goofy and dignified. Whether he is shouting his anger and frustration, teasing or testing a friend, or barely able to speak at all, he is utterly captivating and believable. The Doctor's essential qualities shine through Matt Smith at every moment of his performance. Every time he appears on the screen, it becomes a little harder for me to continue to claim that David Tennant is "my Doctor." Arthur Darvill as Rory is no slouch, either. He has excellent comic timing and a core of believability, and by the end of the series his character is utterly heroic as well as lovable. Tony Curran's Vincent is engaging and tragic and real, especially during the character's high and low points. If I could nominate a fourth actor it would be Toby Jones as the Dream Lord, the Valeyard reimagined as the King of Snark.

Best Actress: Karen Gillan and Alex Kingston are a lot of fun to watch, although it must be said that neither approaches the quality of Matt Smith. Fortunately, they don't have to. I went with Sophie Okonedo in the third spot because she's just so engaging as Liz Ten. I could almost as easily have selected Meera Syal, who was the main highlight of the Silurians two-parter.

Best Monster: It wasn't that monster-y a year, despite the cast of thousands shutting the Doctor up in the Pandorica near the end of the season. Aside from the under-Henge walk-ons, the only monsters that posed a real threat were the army of Weeping Angels. The expansions to their modus operandi were interesting and caused viewers some seriously tense moments, especially when Amy was trapped with the Angel from the recording. The premise of Angel Bob, although basically an extension of the data ghost idea of two years ago, was nevertheless inspired. The one thing that didn't quite work with the Angels this year was it was very difficult to believe that they were following the old rules as well, in terms of when they could and could not move.

Best Villain: The Dream Lord was sinister and funny, a great personification of the Doctor's inner critic, that nasty voice inside each of us that whispers we're no good and should give up now. Cross the Valeyard at his strangest with a sarcastic Doctor Who fan, and you end up with a character very much like the Dream Lord.

Best Male Supporting Character: There's no question on this one: it has to be Rory Williams. Rory is funny and likable from his first moments on screen, and just grows from there. Even as a relatively unadventurous stay-at-home in this early stories, he's reacting with intelligence and common sense to all he sees, noticing what others do not. He proves himself when defending Amy with a broom, and later hauls her to safety with an apology for every bump up a flight of stairs. He tries to save the Doctor from Restac, overcomes his Auton programming (just a little too late) at Stonehenge, protects Amy in the Pandorica for nearly 2000 years, and by the end of the series is nearly as adventurous as Amy and utterly worthy of her (but is she worthy of him?). What's not to love?

Best Female Supporting Character: Caitlin Blackwood's Young Amelia was utterly perfect in The Eleventh Hour, and almost as good in The Big Bang. Amelia deserved a ride in the TARDIS much more than her older self did, although a seven-year-old companion would undoubtedly invite criticism and nasty accusations. I suppose the series was largely about restoring adult Amy to the person Amelia could have grown into were it not for the losses she suffered along the way.

Best Special Effect: This wasn't a really effects-heavy season. I don't think there was anything wrong with such images as Prisoner Zero as itself, the stars and galaxies being destroyed, etc., but they didn't really stand out, either. The sky about Provence morphing into a version of The Starry Night was magical, though, not so much visually but in the context of the scene. My honorable mention would go to the dilapidated exterior of Starship UK.

Best Music: Murray Gold's most memorable music this year was introduced in The Eleventh Hour and reappeared throughout the season. I'd love to know the names of the individual pieces. I wasn't a big fan of using pop songs in later episodes - well, except Crazy Little Thing Called Love at the wedding!

Greatest Contribution: I put Steven Moffat just ahead of Matt Smith here, but on another day I might have swapped them around. They were both outstanding. The number 3 spot is tougher. As good as Karen Gillan is, did she contribute more than the other executive producers? I don't really know. On the assumption that others will vote for Karen because her contribution is a highly visible one, I went with Piers Wenger instead.

Regards,

Karen
(Mavarin Karen on Gallifrey Base)

NuWho Review Redux: The Big Bang

mavarin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:25:08 GMT

And so we come to the end of the season...

Re: Rate / Review "The Big Bang"

Okay. Okay. I'm back from a real life wedding, very exciting, my first-ever gig taking pictures for money. Although I wasn't qualified to be a wedding photographer, I did my best. Now I've come home to a very different wedding, also very exciting!

Whatever else you say about Steven Moffat, he's full of surprises. This isn't quite the story we expected, is it? At least half of the questions we've been asking are deferred until next series. How did any of this happen, and why? How does one TARDIS destroy the Universe, who made it explode, and what is the Silence? We still don't know. There was no Omega (yet) or other Big Bad (I didn't think there would be); and almost none of the little continuity glitches and other possible clues that we pored over and debated endlessly paid off. I suppose if you're a half-empty sort of person who believes that if the answer isn't right there on the screen, today, that it's a plot hole, then to you The Big Bang is probably one massive plot hole.

This definitely wasn't the episode in my head, at least not before I clicked on one too many spoiler boxes.

And I don't care in the least. I feel like dancing in the streets!

The Doctor cheating his way out of the Pandorica, his wait minimal, courtesy of plastic Rory and River's vortex manipulator! Amy with her life restored, Amy as she should have been, thanks to the Doctor, emotionally connected at last! Faithful Roman Rory, protecting his beloved for nearly 2000 years, and rewarded with his human life back, only better, and a marriage that isn't built on shifting sands. The Pandorica, its original purpose subverted, put to use restoring the universe! The Doctor, very nearly most sincerely dead, wiped from existence and then brought back by a story and a wedding tradition! River, one step closer to being the Doctor's wife, and quite possibly his killer. Little Amelia, believing in the last bits of reality as they disappear from her world, with no raggedy Doctor to help, just a couple of mysterious notes. Come along, Pond! Shooting the Fez! Weddings, family, crazy dancing and happy endings!

I won't make the claim that this is the greatest story in the history of Doctor Who, although just at this moment it's my very favorite. I will, however make the claim that Doctor Who is the greatest television series of all time, from the original Big Bang to the end of the Universe.

Just three bits of advice to others, now that I've had time to read some of the comments on Gallifrey Base:

1. When a Doctor Who episode is as highly anticipated as this one, people tend to speculate wildly in advance of the airdate, building up a scenario in their heads of how it will play out. This is a lot of fun. I do it myself. BUT. Once you do that, there's a danger that your expectations will get in the way of enjoying what's actually on the screen. Steven Moffat is under no obligation to match up to the episode in your head. Nor was RTD, or Robert Holmes or any other Doctor Who scripter ever. It doesn't have Omega in it, so it's bad? There is no villain, so it's boring? No, and no. Let go of expectation, and enjoy what's there on its own terms, not according to some fannish checklist. Oh, and btw, it's perfectly possible to praise or criticize RTD or the Moff without saying nasty things about one's less preferred writer by comparison.

2. This is a more complicated episode than usual. The season finales generally are. If you don't follow exactly what happened the first time through, that doesn't mean it was badly plotted. It means a second viewing is likely to enhance your understanding and enjoyment - unless of course this kind of story is so completely not to your taste that soaking in more of it won't help.

3. Every single episode, a certain number of people will absolutely hate it and others will absolutely love it, with some episodes doing better than others in the polls or in AI. If someone hates it and feels the need to say so in an over-the-top way, people who love it sometimes feel as if something they care about has been attacked, or even as if they personally have been attacked. If someone's posts consistently upset you, feel free to put that person on your ignore list. But please realize that we're all human (as far as we know), with a right to basic courtesy even if our opinions are completely at odds. Suggesting that someone stop watching may seem like a perfectly reasonable point of view, but it turns out that it's not at all helpful. (It also won't have the desired effect. You're not going to convince the other person to stop watching or stop "attacking.") Nor are personal attacks ever justified, against a fan, a writer or anyone else. There are lots of fans here I nearly always disagree with, but what of it? That doesn't justify rudeness. Ever. End of rant.

"It's a Thing; it's like a plan, but with more greatness."
Find me using that magical word, Mavarin.

TEH: 10.
TBB: 8.
VotD: 7 (but should have said 6).
TToA: 10.
FaS: 10.
TVoV: 8.
AC: 8 (should have said 9)
THE: 9 (should have said 8)
CB: 8
VatD: 9 (should have said 10)
TL: 9
TPO: 10
(I don't grade on a curve.)

NuWho review Redux: The Pandorica Opens

mavarin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 05:12:38 GMT

Re: Rate / Review "The Pandorica Opens"

I've just read 20 pages of the GB rate thread, and am about to watch the ep for the third time (excluding the bits I rewatched while wading through the posts). I have not rated the ep yet, and may not do so until next weekend. That, for me, would be unprecedented. I always rate an episode within 24 hours, after watching it two or three times.

But I truly don't know what my opinion of this one will be in the long run. So much depends upon how it all shakes out next week. I trust the Moff to fit it all together, but I'm not so sure how much I'll like the final puzzle.

Some points:

1. Anyone complaining in advance about a pending reset button should perhaps consider that the concept of time being rewritten or even unwritten has been building all series. That needs to be paid off, because otherwise it's a violation of the Chekhov's Gun principle. It's not a cheap Get Out of Jail Free card if it's integral to the entire series. To NOT see time rewritten in the finale would be the cheat from a dramatic standpoint.

2. As of the last few seconds of the episode, the armada is gone, the stars are gone and the Earth is gone. We don't know for an absolute fact that the TARDIS is destroyed, but it's the most likely cause of the rest of the Universe (at least the Earth and vicinity) suddenly disappearing. If the Earth is gone, Amy is definitely dead, Auton Rory ceases to exist, and the Doctor, unless he's already escaped somehow, ceases to exist (assuming the Pandorica isn't dimensionally transcendental, which is probably isn't). Unless you want Doctor Who to continue with no Doctor, no TARDIS, no Earth and probably no Universe, of course time needs to be rewritten. Exactly what shape that rewrite takes we don't know yet, but clearly it has to be enough of a "reset" to get the Earth back at the very least. And no, that's not a fake reality, as far as we can tell. It's the one we'[ve been in all season, crumbling into nothing. It's only the Auton Romans that are faked, in the same multi-species conspiracy that created the Pandorica and the fairy tale about it.

3. There is still the possibility of somebody escaping nonexistence via a Crack. Just sayin'. Also, River ruefully wonders "Oh, Doctor. Why do I let you out?" Hmm. [Did she already free him in her personal past? Has it anything to do with her murder conviction?]

4. It isn't necessary that all species in the alliance be the Doctor's enemies per se, nor that they get along in perfect harmony, or even that they all be time traveling species (or based in 102 AD). The species that do time travel could easily give the others a lift via time corridor or whatever, once the threat is recognized across time and space as well as the perceived need to stop the Doctor from (as they believe) destroying the Universe. Even the Daleks didn't set out to destroy reality for the heck of it; they believed they would survive Davros' reality bomb. In this situation they would want the Universe to survive so they can get back to exterminating everyone else and become the masters of the Universe. Since the Doctor has defeated or outsmarted almost all of them at one time or another, an alliance is a reasonable strategy.

5. The above is basically observation, logic and speculation, but from here I go to my opinions about the effectiveness of the episode itself. I liked the pre-titles setup very much, loved Roman Auton Rory, loved River's cheeky notes on the cell wall and the cliff face, and liked the parallels between Rory and Bracewell. The latter is almost enough to redeem that part of VotD, but the fact remains that there isn't the slightest patina of logic or explanation in the Bracewell bomb scene, whereas Auton Rory fighting his programming and Amy trying to help him do that makes a lot of sense. Their failure makes the attempt even more powerful.

6. The Doctor trying to delay the armada with a speech of awesomeness is kind of annoying at first blush; this device loses power each time it's used. What redeems it this time, as others have said is that it's a double bluff. The aliens are outmaneuvering the Doctor, and he doesn't know it yet.

7. Granted, I saw the Peter McKinstry sketch showing the Doctor confined in the Pandorica, but even before that it was obvious to me that there is only one being in the Whoniverse that remotely fits the description of the Pandorica's prisoner. I spent much of the episode berating the Doctor for not figuring this out. But it took my husband to figure out, partway through the ep, that the Doctor wasn't in there yet. The Doctor's obtuseness here is consistent with his many other moments of obtuseness through the season, but I don't like being that far ahead of the Doctor when it comes to figuring out something that important. The Doctor absent-mindedly taking Roman Rory for granted at first was also mildly annoying. [Then it became my favorite scene.] I think these niggles are a matter of personal taste on my part, not a problem with the writing.

8. On the other hand, the developments in the Amy storyline were brilliant. My annoyance all season with the word Pandorica, which sounded like a lame sf-redress of the name Pandora, disappeared when it was revealed that it was supposed to be exactly that. Add to that the Doctor revealing his concern over the girl alone in a big, time-cracked house, and the revelation that the Romans and Pandorica were devised from her memories really works pretty well.

All these elements will either get more awesome as Moffat frills in the massive holes (cracks?) in our knowledge next week, or become less satisfactory if some element doesn't quite work in the end. Until then, I suspect that whatever grade I give this one will be regretted by me later, when I want to raise or lower it.

Karen

Favorite scene:

The Doctor: Okay, Romans. Good. I was just wishing for Romans. [Barely glances at Rory.] Good old River. How many?
Rory: Fifty men up top, volunteers. [points at Cyber suit] What about that thing?
The Doctor: Fifty? You're not exactly a legion.
Rory: Your friend was very persuasive, but, uh, it's a tough sell.
The Doctor: Yes, I know that, Rory. I'm not exactly one to miss the obvious...
[Rory tries and fails to interrupt]
The Doctor: ...but we need everything we can get. Okay. Cyber weapons. This is basically a sentry box. The headless wonder here was a sentry. Probably got himself duffed up by the locals. Never underestimate a Celt.
Rory: Doctor...
The Doctor: Hush, Rory, thinking. Why leave a Cyberman on guard unless it's a Cyber-thing in the box? But why would they lock up one of their own? Okay, no, not a Cyber-thing but what? What? Nooo, missing something obvious, Rory, something big, something right slap in front of me. I can feel it.
Rory: Yeah, I think you probably are.
The Doctor: I'll get it in a minute.
[The Doctor walks away. A moment later there is a crash as he drops the Cyber-weapons. He reappears and stares at Rory. He pushes against Rory's breastplate. Rory rocks on his heels.]
The Doctor: Hello again.
Rory: Hello.
The Doctor: How have you been?
Rory: Good. Yeah. Good. I mean, Roman....
The Doctor: Rory, I'm not trying to be rude, but you died.
Rory: Yeah, I know. I was there.

Re: How will Amy not die?

Notice everything. What happens at the very end, AFTER Amy dies and the Pandorica closes?

1. The TARDIS appears to blow up.
2. Everything out in space around the Earth blows up and disappears - the armada, stars, galaxies, whatever.
3. The Earth disappears.

Now, unless the Earth slipped into another universe, it doesn't matter what state Dead Amy and Auton Rory were in just moments before. The planet is gone, taking them with it, as well as the Pandorica itself. There is no way forward for those characters from that moment in time.

But what were we told repeatedly in Flesh and Stone, supported by later episodes? Time can be rewritten. Time can be unwritten. Cracks are appearing throughout space and time, starting from the explosion of the TARDIS on 26 June 2010. The cracks connect "two points in space and time that should never have touched." Furthermore, the Doctor stuck his hand through a crack and survived. Prisoner Zero slipped through a crack and survived.

Amy's house may be a TARDIS, or contain a TARDIS, or contain part of a TARDIS.

And River has a time agent's vortex manipulator. [Actually, no. We last see it lying on the ledge of the Pandorica exterior with the Doctor. No, wait. She's wearing it in the TARDIS scenes.]

For any of this to be solved, the Doctor has to be freed before the Earth ceases to exist in 102 AD. I see three ways for that to happen. Any one of them works for me:

1. via crack
2. via River and her vortex manipulator
3. via Amy and her mysterious third floor.

Or maybe all of the above.

NuWho Review Redux: The Lodger

mavarin — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 04:11:04 GMT

Re: Rate / Review "The Lodger"

9 out of 10 for me. I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of that. Well, except for the air kisses. Someone should have told the Doctor that only actors do that. Which of course MS is, but let's not get too meta here. The placement of this story in the season is pretty much perfect - from caverns full of Silurians to famous artist plus monster to ordinary people in Colchester, all leading to the season-ending blowout.

Having no prior experience liking or disliking James Corden or his work, I expected, and got, exactly what I saw in the preview clips, a likable, low-key Everyman character, convincingly played. I genuinely felt for Craig, with his ongoing dilemma over his inability to express his love for Sophie, his helpless frustration over the status quo (the Doctor's analysis of Sophie's personal rut applying equally to Craig) and his bewildered discomfort over the upheaval the Doctor brings to his life.

As for Matt Smith's wonderfully eccentric Doctor, I don't find his performance here at all a departure from his excellent portrayals throughout the season. Not one incarnation of the Doctor, even Pertwee, could pass as normal while sharing a flat with a human. The Eleventh Doctor is a bit more "out there" than most of his previous selves, and that's part of what I love about him. That said, I have a very low tolerance for "embarrassment humor," the kind that comes from a character behaving idiotically or unrealistically. (For example, I pretty much can't watch I Love Lucy.) Gareth Roberts flirted with the edge of my tolerance range in The Unicorn and the Wasp (mostly in the poisoning antidote scene), and this episode could easily have sailed over the edge and become unwatchable for me. But it never did. By the time the Doctor did his third set of air kisses, I was even prepared to accept those! Transmitting what Craig needed to know by head butt was unusually violent, but on the other hand I can't see Craig agreeing to let this weird guy he's trying to evict hold his head in his hands for a gentle and loving tête-à-tête. And the Doctor was in a hurry, after all! Also, he and Craig clearly found it painful, and the Doctor said he would never do it again, so that's a clear warning to the kiddies not to "try this at home."

The Something at the Top of the Stairs really worked for me as well, so much so that I was genuinely stressed out as Sophie headed up there. That was clearly not the contest winner's TARDIS design, but given the plot constraints it probably couldn't be a cobbled-together Rube Goldberg creation like the Doctor's TARDIS. The episode didn't try to explain the origin of the timeship, but that doesn't bother me. There may well be a payoff to it in a future episode. Nor does the "kiss the girl" denouement seem nearly as nonsensical or contrived as (for example) talking Bracewell out of exploding earlier this season. In fact I think it kind of worked and made sense!

And finally, there's Amy in the TARDIS. I wasn't expecting to see much of her this episode, and applaud the idea of the "TARDIS Bluetooth." That fits right in with Rose's and Martha's Superphones and the TARDIS having a phone number that Churchill can call. People who complain that Amy is "shouty" here are not taking into account that she's being thrown about in an extra-loud TARDIS in crisis. She's hardly going to use her quiet voice. I can understand if people don't enjoy the character at her loudest, but Karen G. is matching Amy perfectly to her situation here.

The crack at the end started out to be a step back to the almost-gratuitous appearances at the end of The Beast Below and Victory of the Daleks, only to turn into a big step forward. When Amy finds and opens her ring from Rory, the crack starts to open. Clearly it's a cause and effect! Is it next week yet?

Karen

"It's a Thing; it's like a plan, but with more greatness."

Find me using that magical word, Mavarin.

The Eleventh Hour: 10.
The Beast Below: 8.
Victory of the Daleks: 7 (but should have said 6).
The Time of Angels: 10.
Flesh and Stone: 10.
The Vampires of Venice: 8.
Amy's Choice: 8 (should have said 9)
The Hungry Earth: 9 (should have said 8)
Cold Blood: 8
Vincent and the Doctor: 9 (should have said 10)

(I don't grade on a curve.)

NuWho Review Redux: Vincent and the Doctor

mavarin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 02:58:39 GMT

Re: Rate / Review "Vincent and the Doctor"

I feel churlish giving this "only" a 9. I absolutely loved it, and was on the edge of tears at the end.

Unusually for me, I don't have much to say about this one yet, even after having watched it three times. The portrayal of Vincent was utterly wonderful, so vulnerable and mercurial and lovable and real. It was thrilling to see all those famous paintings sitting unregarded in the artist's home, and the director, set designers, cinematographers etc. did an amazing job of recreating Van Gogh's Provence, with all the right colors and iconic images. The Starry Night scene, with these three wonderful characters holding hands and the sky transforming above them, was nothing short of magical.

As always when I'm tempted to rate an episode a 10, I looked hard for something flawed or inconsistent, or even something I didn't like. I thought the first time through that there was a problem with compressed time from night to day as the Doctor goes off to his TARDIS and gets the mirror / identifier gadget. Watching it again, through, I see the sky lightening with dawn as he approaches the TARDIS, and the implied lapse in time before he finds the gadget. Meanwhile, Amy and Vincent have presumably gone to bed, having been up nearly all night talking, as often happens in an intense new friendship. Nor is Vincent awakened the moment the Doctor gets back, we can assume, because breakfast is prepared before the "wakey-wakey" moment.

That leaves just one tiny thing to bother me in the entire episode, and that's the Doctor being so appallingly bad at deducing where the monster is based on Vincent's position and actions. In retrospect, I probably should not have docked the episode a full point for just that!

K.

On Vincent's ability to see an invisible monster:

Indeed, it's a bit of a science fantasy trope, that the mentally ill can see what others cannot. In Quantum Leap, for example, people who were drunk or mentally ill could see Al's hologram, which normally only Sam could see. In Buffy, the people whose sanity had been stolen by Glory could see that Dawn was the mystical key, and that her human life prior to transformation was a lie.

And if you think about it, it fits in with the popular conception of some kinds of mental illness, the idea that the brains of such people operate differently, giving rise to a different set of perceptions. Which can be literally true in the case of people who hallucinate.

PS. I just want to link to this review because I love it and can snag episode quotes from it:
Flick Filosopher: ‘Doctor Who’ blogging: “Vincent and the Doctor”

NuWho Review Redux: Cold Blood

mavarin — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:53:34 GMT

8/10 from me, not because there's anything wrong with it (I gave last week's a 9, when in retrospect it should have been an 8), but because this is quite a bit darker than I like my Doctor Who. This is Torchwood territory, and I don't mean that in a good way. This is like when Torchwood gets too dark for me, as in Chris Chibnall's Countrycide, or, goodness knows, in Children of Earth. Midnight was traumatic enough. I didn't want to see Doctor Who get this deep into the "drak side of humanity" vein.

Structurally, I don't think there's much wrong with this. Although the business with the Crack appears to be arbitrarily shoved into the story at that particular moment, I don't suppose it really is. We know from past episodes (and now from the "shrapnel") that it is somehow related to the TARDIS, and also to Amy and Rory's wedding. Naturally the Crack would appear by the TARDIS just as Rory's death is about to come along to destabilize things further. As for the rest of the story, while it's tonally very different from last week, everything that happens here was already set up, in that episode or in the season generally.

Let's see, specifics. I'll go by character. Tony Mack worked for me, because I could just about buy his hiding his green veins problem from a daughter already wild with worry about her husband and son. It may even have been a reasonable choice, given that he probably knows how she might react to the additional stress. What little we got of Elliot this week fits in fine with what we already know of him. I guessed from the moment Tony was set to stay behind that Nasreen would stay too; it makes perfect sense for her character and beats the heck out of her getting killed off.

But oh, that Ambrose. Oh, dear. She was such a loose cannon, almost from the beginning, that she was barely likable even before she did the single worst and stupidest thing possible. She's just about believable, but only because of the nuances the actress gave her throughout, and only because she didn't actually murder Ayala. She only tortured her to death. Yeah, that's much better. *shudder* But what I mean is, she didn't deliberately do the really stupid thing of leaving herself without a hostage to exchange for her family. She actually says that she expected Ayala to back down and tell her how to save her dad. "I would have," she says. So. Believable, but really, really unpalatable. She's the reason I turned to my husband once during the episode and said, "I'm really hating this."

And then there are the two fanatically genocidal warrior sisters. Does the one not understand that the other would deliberately turn her captivity to a virtual suicide mission in order to achieve martyrdom and provoke a war? Is it such a surprise that Ayala is dead? And given that Restac is keen to assume the humans are attacking and exterminate them regardless, Ayala's ploy/sacrifice seems unnecessary, unless the non-warrior class characters need to be convinced. Now those two, I like. I'm not sure Malohkeh's character quite holds up under scrutiny, the earlier scenes of dissection and medical experiments quite fitting in with his later gentleness and geniality; but I suppose I can just about buy that he means no harm. Certainly Mo seems none the worse for "dissection" aside from an interesting scar. And Stephen Moore's Eldane is the Silurian we've been waiting for all these years, the reasonable person willing to negotiate in good faith, and not easily pushed into "humans must die" mode. (And frankly, it's a thrill to get Stephen Moore into Doctor Who anyway, as a character so very different from Marvin. I like his recordings of the H2G2 books at least as well as the Douglas Adams ones.)

And finally, finally, we get a result other than the humans killing off all those murderous Earth Reptiles. It's been a long time coming, forty years in fact. One question, though: why are all the nasty Silurians female, and the nice ones male? Ah, well. I suppose there would be more of a mixture in the general populace, but nearly all the non-warriors sleep through the story.

The end bit? I spoiled myself earlier in the week, and was dreading this. Overall it was well done. My only real problem is that the Doctor is safe from being erased from existence while actually sticking his arm through the crack, by virtue of a handkerchief on his hand. Really? Maybe it's only when the time energy (or whatever) comes out of the crack that it becomes a cosmic eraser, but that's not actually said. And if it's a matter of not touching his skin, well, I think the time energy light is only up to Rory's covered legs when the Doctor abandons his body. It's possible to make this all work, but as it appears on screen it's more than a little dodgy.

Rory's death scene itself was perfect. Every word and every expression from Arthur Darvill was just right. Amy's shell of wisecracking unflappability falls away for the second time this series, and for the same reason. Notice that her "clingy" remark earlier is her making light of her own danger; her delivery of that line is not genuinely carefree, but more a show of defiance. At least, it is to my ears. Amy doesn't go to pieces easily over her own peril, something we've known ever since fish custard. But actually losing Rory makes her go to pieces. He's the one reliable source of love and stability in her life, even if she seldom appreciates this until he's threatened or killed.

Which brings us to the whole forgetting thing. I was worried that she'd just instantly forget him, la-di-dah, let's go meet Van Gogh. But no, she has to be pulled away from his body, and then struggles to keep his memory alive with the Doctor's help. That really works for me. It comes off very differently from Donna's superficially similar memory loss, largely because the Doctor has the opposite intent this time. It was nice to see a flashback sequence that has a strong in-story reason (it's not we who need to remember, but Amy), and that has scenes NOT appearing in previous episodes. That's a good touch, emphasizing that Rory's presence in Amy's life didn't start the day Prisoner Zero was caught by the Atraxi.

Then Amy loses Rory anyway, through mechanics of memory and rewritten time that are kind of the opposite of what I'm used to seeing. In Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet, for example, it's the people closest to the rewriting of history (Charles Wallace and Meg) that remember the original timeline. Here that is inverted, with Amy remembering strangers erased from history but not her own fiance killed in front of her. Our Amy becomes a different Amy, who never made Rory dress up as the raggedy Doctor, who didn't run away from her wedding, and who has no reason to be upset of angst-y as she sails off into the next adventure.

The poor Doctor, on the other hand, racks up mixed results with the Silurian negotiations, a major loss with the death of a companion for the first time since Adric, a secondary loss with Amy losing part of her history and identity, and the knowledge of future loss as he holds a piece of the TARDIS's destroyed outer shell in his hand. Amy's suffering here is finite because of what happens to her memory, but the Doctor's suffering is profound - and he's not allowed to show it, for Amy's sake. But then, that's what the Doctor does anyway. He buries his hurts and goes on.

K.

"Time is not the boss of me." --The Doctor

Find me on Twitter, Blogger and elsewhere using that magical word, Mavarin.

The Eleventh Hour: 10.
The Beast Below: 8.
Victory of the Daleks: 7 (but should have said 6).
The Time of Angels: 10.
Flesh and Stone: 10.
The Vampires of Venice: 8.
Amy's Choice: 8 (should have said 9)
The Hungry Earth: 9

NuWho Review Redux: The Hungry Earth

mavarin — Thu, 27 May 2010 08:25:11 GMT

Finally catching up to the present in my repost of my GB rate thread reviews. Here are my first thoughts on The Hungry Earth:

Re: Rate / Review "The Hungry Earth"
9/10 from me, because it was better than I thought it could possibly be, pretty much the best possible execution of what it set out to do, given what they had to work with. A few other stories aimed higher and just missed for their nine out of ten. This one aimed a little lower but exceeded expectations, at least for me. YMMV, of course.

I spent part of this week watching the nearly three hour long Pertwee story Doctor Who and the Silurians plus extras, having stalled out at this very story the last time I attempted to continue my personal all-time-Who marathon. Trust me, by comparison, "The Hungry Earth" doesn't drag. Even by current tv standards it doesn't drag. I think perhaps people today are just impatient to get to the payoff, and will inevitably be dissatisfied with a Part One for that reason.

If characters in the current series have sometimes been too sketchy (e.g. Breen the almost-war-widow, most of Father Angelo's clerics), that was not at all a problem here. Each member of the guest cast was quickly but vividly delineated. The only cringeworthy moment was the outbreak of clapping, and since it was meant to be cringeworthy, that's fine. The one character who annoyed me was Ambrose, the mother. I don't suppose it's necessary for me to be especially fond of her, just to believe in her as a realistic character, which I do. I especially liked Eliot's interactions with his dad and the Doctor, and Nasreen Chaudhry's eagerness to jump aboard the TARDIS for a trip down below. And I was horrified to realize that I, like the Doctor, had failed to notice that the kid had not safely returned in time. I think I felt nearly as guilty as the Doctor about that!

It was a lot of fun to see Rory faced with a standard Doctor Who mistaken identity scenario, be momentarily flummoxed, and then mentally shrug and go with it. There wasn't much to Amy's screen time, but what there was worked find for me, although the "shush" line was very Donna.

Speaking of the Doctor, Matt Smith is now firmly entrenched as my second favorite Doctor ever, right behind David Tennant. I see no reason to use one interpretation of the character to criticize the other. Nor do I have a problem with Amy, although she's not my all-time favorite. Not sure which one is my favorite, actually. Similarly, I see no point in hitting Moffat with an RTD stick or vice versa. Some fans seem to filter everyone else's praise or criticism (and their own) through a dualistic view of NuWho, that everything is about who is the showrunner (and to a lesser extent, the star) of the story in question, with the corollary that "if RTD had made this, then..." Not necessarily, and ultimately not a terribly helpful way of looking at each story.

But this one, of course, is more about 1970 than about 2005-2009. As such, it stuck fairly close to its source material, but in a fairly fresh and satisfying way, enlivened by good characters and with nice hints of innovations to come. One of the reasons I put off rewatching Doctor Who and the Silurians for so long is that I found the end rather upsetting and depressing. To give the Doctor another crack at brokering peace between the former and current masters of Earth is a fine idea. Mind you, if it ends up with the same exact result I'll no longer think so! The fact that UNIT isn't around (so far) gives me hope that the Earth Reptiles won't simply be blown up this time.

What was the old story that had black veins (not green) spreading across victims' faces? The Moonbase? The Wheel in Space? That's what the tongue-based infection reminded me of more than The Green Death.

As for the costume and makeup design, it really is beautiful compared to what went before. Given that each population of Eocene creatures (or whatever) that we saw back in the day was a little different, I'm not thrown too much that this is a "different branch" of the family, if not the genus or species. It would have been nice to get a nice third eye in there, courtesy of Neil Gorton and the Mill, but honestly, even losing that nuance we have a design and execution that's 1000 times more believable that the old rubber suit brigade. The old show did amazing things with clumsy rubber suits and caves cobbled together in the studio at the last minute (no, really, they had a big problem with the subcontractor responsible for the cave walls), but it wasn't actually better than modern Who, even at its most iffy. Oh, and the "mining thing" - i.e. the gantries - looked very much the right sort of thing, from my limited perspective. I once visited an old mine works at a ghost town in New Mexico, and it had a tower (designed by Eiffel, no less!) that was similar, albeit less modern and advanced.

I wasn't at all looking forward to this one, but Chibnall, Moffat et al.

On population/staffing issues:

Watch again. When the drill hits the 21km mark on what we assume is late Friday afternoon, there is a reasonable staff there, clipboards and all. Then they all knock off for the weekend and go home to wherever they "commute in" from, as stated in the story. It's also stated that Ambrose presumably delivers meals to people in other villages in the area. That doesn't help in the present situation, because the energy dome cuts these people off from other places nearby.

Afterthoughts
A few things that bothered me, especially after others pointed them out:

1. The Doctor advises Amy not to struggle, as if this were tv/movie quicksand, and loses Amy into the ground. Meanwhile, a few feet away, Nasreen gets the other guy out of a similar hole with relatively little difficulty. A clumsy bit of plotting, that.

2. I can buy the Doctor failing to keep Elliot from breaking Rule One (Don't wander off) because the Doctor is distracted, doesn't supervise children very often, and generally is spectacularly bad at enforcing Rule One. But Ambrose not having her eye on her son,nd not even noticing at first that he's not in the church when the door closes, is quite a bit harder to swallow.

3. Nasreen does kind of a quick turnaround in her attitude toward the Doctor. I can buy that, but she really needed a character beat in which we see her realizing that the guy with the wile claims is making sense after all.

Ratings: 2010 series to date:

The Eleventh Hour: 10.
The Beast Below: 8.
Victory of the Daleks: 7 (but should have said 6)
The Time of Angels: 10.
Flesh and Stone: 10.
The Vampires of Venice: 8.
Amy's Choice: 8 (should have said 9)
The Hungry Earth: (should have said 8)

mavarin — Mon, 24 May 2010 07:53:42 GMT

Re: Rate / Review "Amy's Choice"

I was torn between an 8 and a 9, and now I wish I'd gone with the 9. First off, the episode was beautifully shot, especially the closeups of frozen faces in the TARDIS toward the end. Our lead actors were all terrific, but then I always think so. The mind game stuff and competition between the Doctor and Rory was extremely well done. I didn't suspect the Dream Lord's identity at all (I was leaning toward him being the Master of the Land of Fiction), but it makes perfect sense in retrospect. That line about him being the one who hates the Doctor the most was really effective, the more so when you realize that he was talking about his own self-loathing, the guilt and negativity he manages to hide away inside himself most of the time.

So why did I mark it down? Two things, one totally subjective reason and one plot point that I thought could have been more dramatic. On the former, well, I just didn't care for the murderous alien parasites inside the old people. Nothing really wrong with them as a plot device, it just didn't quite work for me.

And the dramatic weakness? Amy's choice is ultimately between a bleak future without Rory or a "reality" in which she has both Rory and the Doctor. How hard is that to decide? Sure, it must be a little hard to commit to "suicide" to escape that reality, to take that chance, even if that reality is really dreadful. But imagine instead a choice between, for example, dead Rory and dead Doctor, or a wonderful life with one man or the other, but not both. Make it a real wrench; make her work for it. Much more dramatic, wouldn't you say?

Still, the end works well enough, and there's so much that's great in this episode that I probably should not have rounded down my 8.5 out of 10 to an 8, but gone with the 9 instead. Ah, well!

K.

***
On the use of a dream trope, particularly the "all a dream" status of the TARDIS sequences:

The basic problem with "And then they woke up, and it was all a dream" as a device is that it robs the story of drama and import. If it was just a dream, then presumably there are no consequences to what you've just read or seen, and there is no resolution to the original conflict. The reader or viewer has been, in effect, cheated and lied to. He or she was encouraged to invest intellectually and emotionally in something that wasn't real, and then robbed of a resolution to those thoughts and feelings.

Personally, I really hate that kind of story. The "all a dream" ending ruins Alice in Wonderland for me, and to a lesser extent (partially redeemed by the setup with actors in dual roles) the film version of The Wizard of Oz.

But here was have something altogether different from that. From the first sight of pregnant Amy, we know something is up, because that's not how we left her last week. Within minutes we know for sure that at least one of the situations our characters are experiencing is a dream, so we're not being tricked or cheated. Instead we're invited to play along with both the intellectual puzzle - what is reality and how will the the characters work this out? - and the emotional one involving Amy's relationships with the two men in her life. Really, the best comparison for this story is not with Alice or Oz, but with the Buffy episode "Restless," where the dreamscapes were established as such from the outset, and nevertheless had real world consequences.

The final twist - neither situation is real - can be deduced without becoming annoyingly obvious in the meantime. Clues include the cold star, Amy's recognition that Rory's bucolic village would not satisfy her, and, as he supposedly concedes defeat, the Dream Lord's remark about "fictions" - plural. Moreover, even though we are told not to trust that what see see is real, there are still emotional consequences, and a slight possibility of physical consequences in case we and the characters guessed wrong.

Works for me!

K.

and

I was probably about twelve, but perhaps younger, when the end of Alice struck me as a cheat, largely because it gets her instantly out of danger from the Queen. Even though I've had The Annotated Alice on my shelves for nearly 30 years, I've never gone back to look at how the story stands up to an adult's understanding and sensibilities. Maybe an adult (particularly a Victorian adult) would immediately see the nonsensical world down the rabbit hole for the dreamscape that it is, and accept Alice's rejection of this reality ("nothing but a pack of cards!") as an acceptable resolution. But really, for a child especially, are hookah-smoking caterpillars and rabbits with fob watches (the White Rabbit is a Time Lord?) that much dreamier than Mr. Toad and friends, or the flying boy with the escaped shadow in a world of pirates, Indians and mermaids? Come to think of it, Peter Pan is implicitly a dream world as well, accessed from a bedroom. But Wendy et al. don't escape from danger simply by waking up.

The idea of suicide as the stated rule for how to escape the dream is an interesting reversal of other dream fiction. For example, in Thurber's "A Friend to Alexander," getting shot by Aaron Burr in a dream is fatal to the dreamer in real life. In the usual order of things, one just needs to stay alive long enough to wake up, which makes the nightmare basically a surreal version of the waking world, in which the danger may or may not be real. Here, the Doctor and friends are explicitly told that their only escape is through death, with the possibility of that death being a real one. That makes the drama less physical and more psychological, and the story is better for it.

***
On Amy's options:

But see, if that's the case [that Amy choosing between Upper Leadworth and the TARDIS is essentially the same thing as choosing Rory or the Doctor], then the choice she makes undercuts that, because by that point in the story it's not set up for her to make that choice. At that stage, Rory is gone from the Leadworth option. If she chooses Leadworth, then she's got the baby, and nonagenarian killer aliens, and either a quiet life (which she's already expressed dissatisfaction with) or the possibility of climbing back aboard the TARDIS (with a baby? Wouldn't that be interesting!). If she rejects Leadworth, and she's guessed correctly, she's got Rory, and the Doctor, and the freedom of TARDIS travel. She also still has the opportunity, if she survives, of having the baby later.

So the choice is ultimately not between Rory and the Doctor at all. It's between Rory's preferred world, only without Rory to make it bearable, and the Doctor's preferred world with all the goodies: Rory, the Doctor, and freedom. There is no intellectual difficulty at that point, and no incentive to choose Leadworth (since the baby exists as future potential in the TARDIS version). The choice she makes is therefore the only reasonable one.

Even so, she makes that choice for the emotional reason, to be reunited with Rory and in grief over losing him otherwise. Fortunately, Rory catches on that Amy chose the Doctor's preferred reality for Rory's sake. It's not the only possible interpretation of her decision, but he apparently can tell from what little she says and the say she says it that she did it for him. That's the emotional core of the story, at least as far as Amy is concerned. I think her emotional state is perfectly valid for this character in this situation.

For what it's worth, I do think Amy's relationship with Rory and the Doctor is very important to the story, but not the only important aspect of it. The puzzle and the Doctor/Dream Lord stuff are the other two legs of the stool. And although Rory's death does make Amy's choice too easy in the sense that it's not a choice between Rory and the Doctor, with no chance to have both, I'm not all that bothered by this. It has the intended result: it gives her a new appreciation for Rory and reassures Rory himself, while not breaking the format by ending her time in the TARDIS prematurely. That's more important than a clinical Leadworth/TARDIS or simplistic Rory or the Doctor choice.

and

If heaven enters into Amy's calculations (as the dialogue implies), that's the other part of the same gamble. If Leadworth is real, and she dies, she might see Rory in Heaven. (Let's discount the idea that suicide is often thought to preclude heaven as a destination.) That's a calculation based on consequences (Stay, no Rory, die, maybe Rory) rather than the inherent likeliness of "Upper Leadworth" being real. It's merely adding an extra possibility to the equation:

Option One: Live in Upper Leadworth, Die in the TARDIS
IF CORRECT GUESS
*Chance of being with Rory (alive) - 0%
*Chance of having a baby - 99%
*Chance of traveling with the Doctor - approx 1%
*Chance of seeing Rory in Heaven anytime soon - negligible
IF INCORRECT:
*Chance of being with Rory (alive) - 0%
*Chance of having a baby - 0%
*Chance of traveling with the Doctor - 0%
*Chance of seeing Rory in Heaven - presumably good to excellent

Option Two: Die in Upper Leadworth, Live in the TARDIS
IF CORRECT GUESS
*Chance of being with Rory in the TARDIS (and after) - 99%
*Chance of having a baby, eventually - excellent, if desired
*Chance of traveling with the Doctor - approx 99%
*Chance of seeing Rory in Heaven anytime soon - negligible
IF INCORRECT:
*Chance of being with Rory (alive) - 0%
*Chance of having a baby - 0%
*Chance of traveling with the Doctor - 0%
*Chance of seeing Rory in Heaven - presumably good to excellent

The incorrect guesses (resulting in death) are the same, so they cancel each other out. Option One gives her the baby, but no Rory for sure, and probably no Doctor (since he's unlikely to let her travel with a baby). Option Two, which Amy chooses, results in her having access to Rory almost for sure, and secondarily the Doctor. Easy, really. Not that she's likely to reason it out in that much detail, but the emotion of the decision leads the same way.

***

On the consequences for later in the season:

We know the immediate fallout, that Amy's relationship with Rory is strengthened, and they both stay in the TARDIS for now. But we don't know how the developments in the characters' relationships and outlook will play into whatever happens in the season finale.

As I said, I should have given it a 9. Maybe even a 10.

NuWho Review Redux: The Vampires of Venice

mavarin — Mon, 24 May 2010 07:17:54 GMT

Re: Rate / Review "The Vampires of Venice"

8/10 from me. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it certainly didn't have any major flaws as VotDaleks had, but it's not in the very top rank either.

Rory was engaging (no pun intended) and I liked both his broomstick battle and his perceptive critique of the Doctor's effect on companions. Other bits made me cringe a little, though, particularly some of the sex-related banter and innuendo. (This is a personal thing with me, not actually a flaw in the episode itself.) There were a few moments early on when he was cold and not at all humorous, which is believable but somewhat jarring given the tone of his behavior the rest of the time. The character has potential, but I'm not sure he quite gels for me yet.

The other issue I had was with the resolution, with the last female of her species subjecting herself to a particularly gruesome form of suicide rather than try to negotiate with the Doctor for a new start elsewhere. On the other hand, the silly toggle switch at the top of the tower was a fun touch, and didn't bother me a bit.

The term "perception filter" is getting a little overused now, referring to a whole range of effects. In this case it's an illusion, operating in the mind rather than strictly visually. That's a far cry from the usual explanation regarding the TARDIS, TARDIS keys, the pavement above Torchwood and even the possible perception filter (more likely a joke) surrounding the Doctor and River not catching on about the degraded Angels being single-headed two weeks ago. Still, there's no reason there can't be different kinds of perception filters. I just hate to see it become a standard explanation for lots of different things

I'm not sure the vampire lore maps perfectly onto the fish people as explained here, and it's kind of a shame that we've had a handful of vampire variants in televised Doctor Who over the years with no two alike, or even referencing each other on screen. But it was a lot of fun anyway, not really gothic but suitably creepy with the right amount of pathos underneath.

Trogir/Venice makes for a beautiful, historic and intriguing backdrop, and what little CG there is perfectly adequate. Works for me! And three cheers for the First Doctor's library card!

K.

___

In retrospect I'm sticking with 8, but it's a low 8.

NuWho Review Redux: Flesh and Stone

mavarin — Mon, 24 May 2010 07:13:30 GMT

Re: Rate / Review "Flesh and Stone"

Another 10/10 from me. Matt Smith continues to astonish me with his characterization of the Doctor - he's already managed to leapfrog (or giraffe?) his way into the #2 spot on my personal list of favorite Doctors. Karen Gillan and Alex Kingston are very good also, along with the guest cast, but Matt is the big standout here.

The plot is complex, diverting and virtually flawless. I have a tiny niggle about whether the Angels are looking at each other as they move toward the end, but perhaps they have arranged themselves well enough to prevent this. Each episode has deepened the Angel lore without contradicting what went before, instead adding additional layers of meaning and scariness to what we already knew. Love it.

I also love that a) the Doctor and Amy have finally noticed the Crack, b) the Crack has become more overtly dangerous, and c) that the Doctor uses problem #2, the Crack, to solve problem #1, the Angels.

River was excellent this week, playful but compassionate and competent, and not particularly smug. Her story gets more intriguing with each new revelation, and I think it's great that Moffat plans to tell her whole story. I especially like that the Doctor is not thrown by River's crime or the clear implication about who she probably killed, and now looks forward to future encounters rather than wanting to run away.

Amy's pass at the Doctor is a little shocking, but not out of range of behavior for commitment-shy, "mad, impossible Amy" as we've seen her so far. I half expected for the Doctor or Amy to break into a chorus of "Get Me to the Church on Time," in which Alfie Doolittle fully intends to spend the last night before his marriage behaving much as Amy tries to behave here.

Beyond all that, what I really love here is the way Moffat pays off past bits of continuity while setting up further clues to pay off in the future. I'm still not sure what the duckless duck pond has to do with anything, nor how Amy's marriage causes the Cyberking incident to be undone even before the Doctor meets Amy in his personal timeline, but I look forward to leaning more about both. It's terrific to see Moffat picking up elements from RTD's work (Cyberking, "a complicated even in time and space" - Doctor 10.5) and incorporating them into his storyline now. I always loved when RTD took something that happened years earlier and made it seem an integral part of the overall story. For the Moff to use his enormous time brain to do the same thing with someone else's writing is a surprise and a delight.

I'm quite stressed now, wondering how the story of Amy and Rory will play out over the next few episodes. I can hardly wait!

Karen

___

Sticking with my 10/10 here.

NuWho Review Redux: The Time of Angels

mavarin — Mon, 24 May 2010 07:07:06 GMT

Re: Rate / Review "The Time of Angels"

I watched this three times before rating in case I eventually discovered some reason not to give it a 10. I didn't find one.

My husband called it "Steven Moffat's greatest hits" in terms of recurring story elements, but I would add that those elements were handled in new ways and cranked up to 11. The dead cleric soldiers enticing the next victim were reminiscent of RTD's Cyberized Torchwood staff, by way of Miss Evangelista and the two Daves, but really interesting in the way they were handled, especially Sacred Angel Bob with his apologies and deference. And now we know that the Angels can manipulate a lot more than a basement light bulb, which neatly answers the Moff's self-mockery at Gallifrey two years ago, wondering whether the Angels paid the electric bill at Wester Drumlins. And wow, were the Angels themselves ever ramped up in their power and scariness! I was quite tense throughout, especially for Amy.

I'm not a big fan of River insofar as she's such a smug know-it-all, but she has such style and is so funny that it's easy to forgive her, especially when her bickering with the Doctor leads to such comedy gold as the scene in the TARDIS. (It's worth cheekily messing with the mythology of the show and the TARDIS, just to hear Matt's imitation of the engine wheeze. We can always explain away any discontinuities, and say that River's description of why the TARDIS makes that sound is inaccurate, or that only with this rebuild does the TARDIS gain the ability not to make that sound, or Time Lords generally love that sound and deliberately let it be made. Or something. ) I love that the Doctor isn't keen to hang out with River, who constantly throws him off balance with her knowledge and lack of deference, and that Amy teases him about River and makes him stay.

The payoff is that the Doctor reasserts his superior knowledge at the TARDIS door, putting an end to his failures of the past few weeks both there and at the end. Yes, Amy rescues herself, but that's perfectly all right. She isn't the hero of the day this time; the Doctor is, despite the (still offscreen) deaths. That too is as it should be; the Doctor suffers losses, nearly everywhere he goes, which is what makes the occasional "everybody lives" story stand out. And hooray! Next week the Doctor and Amy finally get to notice the darn crack. I was starting to get really annoyed about their obliviousness to that.

I still have questions about little plot niggles, but unlike in the previous two stories I'm confident that answers exist. When did Amy learn of the Doctor's aversion to being called Sir? I don't recall anything like that in VotD but perhaps I missed it or, more likely, it happened off screen. And I'm not at all sure a spotter's guide is sufficient to solve the timing issues surrounding River's knowledge of the Doctor - but again, I trust that Moffat has worked it though in his head.

And how great were Matt and Karen, right from Day One, shot one of filming? There isn't the slightest hint of hesitance or unfamiliarity with their characters. The Doctor is very much the Doctor as we've come to know him over the past several weeks (and in the decades before that), and Amy is very much Amy.

This is soooo much better than last week, right up there with The Eleventh Hour. Got to be a 10. Got to be. YMMV - it always does, across the spectrum of Doctor Who fandom, but as far as I'm concerned, this is about as good as it gets, an absolutely flawless episode. I'll say it again: hooray!

***
About River's wibbly wobbly relationship with the Doctor:

Two things:

1. Somewhere in the different interviews around the time of the New York launch, Moffat says that we're going to get River's whole story. I assume he doesn't mean that we will literally see dozens of meetings, but rather how it begins, who she is and what she becomes to him, and possibly the new suit and gift screwdriver encounter.

2. In this week's Confidential, Moffat says that the Doctor's "only had one major encounter" with River before this. I'm guessing that means Ten took her for that Picnic at Asgard during the gap year, but it wasn't a major adventure, more like a date. It seems clear from the way she flipped the pages in SitL that she keeps the diary in her best guess at his timeline, the better to keep track. It's probably easy for her to remember that their adventure on the Planet of Hats was before she went to Zog; but remembering that from his pov he went to Zog and then Shallacatop and then the Planet of Hats requires recordkeeping. Hence the diary.

***

NuWho Review Redux: Victory of the Daleks

mavarin — Mon, 24 May 2010 06:59:44 GMT

Re: Rate / Review "Victory of the Daleks"

I need another time through this and more sleep to really settle into an opinion, but I gave it a seven, my lowest rating in a while.

It was great to finally see Technicolor Daleks after all these years, the size and slightly odd shape notwithstanding. Colorful Daleks were the only thing of value in the Cushing films IMO, aside from a certain beloved actor. The khaki Daleks' acceptance that they were themselves inferior and should be exterminated was an interesting twist. Variant Daleks usually don't agree that they are "not pure in their blobbyness." It also wasn't clear what part of the Dalek timeline the khaki Daleks hail from. The Doctor called the ones in Journey's End a fully-fledged empire at the height of its power, whereas here they are described as being hardly better off than the Cult of Skaro in Manhattan.

The interplay between the Doctor and Churchill was good, and it was interesting to see the new Doctor's reaction to the Daleks, although it's odd that he's not conflicted about the morality of attempting Genocide of the Daleks (again), if only London weren't in peril if he did it. The ongoing mystery of the crack and Amy's apparent anachronism was intriguing. I'm more convinced than previously that there is something deeply weird about the denizens of Leadworth.

I was genuinely surprised by the Bracewell reveal, and liked that a lot. I disagree that the Doctor should have dumped him on the Dalek ship for two reasons. 1. He didn't know about the bomb until after he arrived on the spaceship, and did not have time later on. 2. Deactivating or detonating Bracewell would be murder as far as the Doctor was concerned. He was sentient. Bracewell sacrificing himself would be acceptable, albeit cliched. The Doctor effectively killing him would not be.

My husband being all grumpy next to me (he didn't like it much at all) probably affected my own opinion, but even so, several problems with the episode really stand out. The main one, which John pointed out, is the Doctor's ineffectualness in this episode. It feels wrong to have the Doctor fail to save the day two weeks in a row. He didn't even prevent Bracewell's detonation at the end, let alone stop the Daleks. You can get away with something like that about once a season, and even then it won't be completely satisfying. Good for Amy, pitching in to help in a way reminiscent of Rose at her best, but the story's resolution should be in the Doctor's capable hands the vast majority of the time.

I also had real problems with the near-instantaneous rollout of alien science that seemingly only existed on paper until then, getting the Spitfires into space. The whole logic of the gravity bubble didn't work for me, but I could have accepted it as too cool to grump about had they done a better job of selling it. Some flimflam explanation and a word about the tech being already in development would have been helpful here.

Similarly, the concept that Bracewell won't blow up if he thinks like a human didn't make any sense at all. Again, a decent handwave would have helped a lot. I don't insist on anything resembling real science, but even a science fantasy about an alien with two hearts and a traveling box needs a reasonable amount of verisimilitude, just so it doesn't through the viewer out of the narrative.

And finally, the death of Breen's "young man" was clumsy and by the numbers. I realize people die in war movies (and in war), but there was nothing clever or interesting about this cliched subplot. This sort of thing was handled much better in The Curse of Fenric.

Overall, lots to like, but major problems as well. I much prefer Gatiss's previous stories.

Karen

***
On Bracewell's positronic brain and Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:

That's how it works in Asimov, and in other people's stories that implicitly or explicitly set robots up to behave along those parameters. Doctor Who does not necessarily fall into that category, however. Even Kettlewell's Robot had only a vague paraphrase of them in his programming (and look how well THAT turned out!)

There is no reason the show can't use the "positronic" term without incorporating the Three Laws into Bracewell's behavior. Indeed, he certainly causes harm to lots of human beings - as long as they're in German planes. In this case, the only implication is that Bracewell has artificial intelligence, filled with, apparently, someone else's memories.

I'[m not disputing, necessarily, that the episode is poorly written. I'm merely saying that the use of the term "positronic" in Doctor Who does not mean that the character with that sort of brain necessarily conforms to standards of behavioral programming set up in short stories by Isaac Asimov. There's plenty to complain about in this episode without insisting that an android with a positronic brain, built by Daleks in a Doctor Who episode, should have conformed to a law about not harming humans that derives from a different author in an entirely different medium.

***

After further reflection and rewatchings, I would downgrade this one to 6/10.

NuWho Review Redux: The Beast Below

mavarin — Mon, 24 May 2010 06:39:13 GMT

From my postings on GB:

"The Beast Below"

I stopped myself from giving this a 9 or 10, and settled on 8.

Positives:
*Great characters and dialogue
*Packed with ideas and the Doctor being clever
*the villains (such as they are) acting for the perceived greater good instead of random malevolence or a meaningless grab for power.
*Nobody dies. Again. Nice bit of misdirection that the boy's odd reaction isn't him being zombie-fied, merely alarmed about the tentacle behind Mandy.
*Liz 10. Coolest. Monarch. Ever.
*The Doctor angry with both humans and himself, because if he kills the whale's higher faculties "I won't be the Doctor any more."
*Amy saves the day, proves her value, stands up to the Doctor and saves him from himself, all by out-Doctoring the Doctor in her observation and deductions once he's revealed the truth about Liz 10. I was practically shouting at the screen that there had to be a fourth and better option than the ones the Doctor enumerated. Amy being the one to find that option was a pleasant surprise.
*Amy's observation about the Doctor's character, just in general.
*The fact that Amy went with him the night before her wedding, even knowing how terrible he is at showing up on time, is now fully explained. It wasn't a plot hole or poor characterization after all.
*A lead-in to the next story, the sort of thing that used to be done way back in the days of Ian and Barbara(!).

One big negative, one smaller one and a few niggles:
*When was the last time the Doctor claimed never to do anything but observe? 1965? Even with a new companion, he doesn't usually try out that particular massive lie. Not the least because, as here, it's bound to be disproved in about 30 seconds.
*If Scotland, and presumably other countries, left on different spaceships, how did they do so without whales of their own? Either everyone but Britain died, or one or more countries managed to build ships, with engines and everything. Where are they? And if they had sufficient means, why didn't Britain do the same? Did they run out of time, or was it simply more expedient to harness the whale instead?
*Niggle: how does Amy end up outside the TARDIS again, with the doors shut? That seems really hard to work out logistically.
*Niggle: how does Amy know he's really old, especially since she doesn't know he's not human until well into the episode? (He already told her he's from another planet, but I suppose she could have thought he was from some offworld human colony.) He may have told her something during her two hours of offering him food at age 7, but overall the timeline of what she learns and when doesn't quite hang together.

Overall, though, I liked it a lot, and it was just the big, fat transparent lie that really bothered me, and secondarily the thing about the other countries.

No, wait. There is one other thing that bothers me, a lot. The overall story is more than a little redolent of Torchwood: Children of Earth. I really dislike stories that portray humanity in such a negative light. It's only the fact that the people in charge of Starship UK are considerably more benign and a little less ruthless than the government that tried to sacrifice all those children in 21st Century Earth, that they have a certain level of guilt and regret instead of self-serving rationalizations, that makes this more bearable. And it's a testament to the strength of other aspects of the story - Amy's wisdom, the Doctor's kindness, Liz's attempts to protect her people - that humanity's frailty here doesn't ruin the story for me.

K.

P.S. Both here and on last week's rate thread, I keep seeing people remarking that they would like to raise their rating after watching the episode again. That being the case, it may be worth watching twice before voting, hmm? That's what I always do. That gives the story a lot of time to sink in and your mind time to examine it more, and pick up things you missed on first viewing. You don't get to be first out of the box, but IMO the opinion is worth a little more than a hasty first impression would be.

***

On Amy and the Doctor not staying all slimy:

You can see Amy finishing her clean-up in Liz 10's chambers.

***

On seeing the star whale from space:

Aside from the fact that the TARDIS was above Starship UK, so that nothing showed beneath, the Star Whale was probably largely enclosed within the ship until Amy and Liz 10 pushed the button. We are told that the original people built their ship "around it," and that the whale was trapped. Also, if the head were outside the ship earlier in the story, the Doctor and Amy would have been vomited out into space rather than into a corridor. It seems almost certain, therefore, that the whale shifted position quite a bit at the end of the episode, becoming much more visible from space.

***

On the appearance of a similar creature in Torchwood:

It was being harvested for meat, in an episode called, IIRC, "Meat." I'm not sure they made it a "space whale" or
Star Whale per se, but it was clearly that sort of thing. And yes, there is a thematic similarity between the two stories, IMO.

***

On the question of how other countries left Earth without star whales of their own:

It's perfectly reasonable to wonder about this plot hole. We're told that by the time the Star Whale came, the other nations of Earth had already left on shops of their own. Presumably they didn't all have star whales, so why couldn't the UK have managed without one? We can rationalize that somehow the UK was technologically backward in that era (more so than every other nation? Really?), or broke, or ignored the warnings until it was too late, or got bogged down in politics. But in the end we really don't know why the UK was driven to exploit the star whale when other nations (probably) were not.

As for the Scottish accent, we're told that Scotland "wanted" its own ship and was therefore not on board Starship UK. Either they avoided the issues that scuppered the UK effort, or they didn't make it off Earth at all. Either way, a Scottish accent would be unusual on Starship UK, if not completely absent except in old recordings.

***

8 is probably about right for this one. A high 8 though.

NuWho Review Redux: The Eleventh Hour

mavarin — Mon, 24 May 2010 06:27:46 GMT

Continuing the reposting of my comments about recent Doctor Who episodes from the Gallifrey Base rate threads. If nothing else, these will make the entries easier for me personally to find and reread, or at lease look up my numerical ratings.

The Eleventh Hour: Initial Comments

That was glorious. "Absolute pinnacle" about covers it. So many surprises - I thought with all the trailers and clips we've been spoonfed these last weeks that I'd just about seen the first ten minutes of the episode. Boy was I wrong!

Favorite bits:

* Amelia packing her little suitcase. It was so sad, knowing he would let her down.
* A completely different reading of "What? What? What?" I thought that signature line was gone forever.
* The sequence with the laptop, and preparing Jeff to take over this part of the world-saving.
* Everybody knows of the Doctor through Amy.
* Ordering the Atraxi back and then scaring them by being the Doctor.
* The return of the finger snap.
*"I am a madman with a box."
* All those Doctor and TARDIS icons...and then the wedding dress.

If I had to come up with a niggle, it would be that talking-at-top-speed Matt is harder to understand than talking-at-top-speed David. I hope he slows down just a little as he goes along.

I suspect Ten will always be my favorite Doctor, but Eleven's first story is wonderfully written, wonderfully performed.

***

On the conversation while eating fish fingers and custard:

This bit of dialogue pays off the whole eating sequence, taking it from the fun of the little girl catering to the stranger's crazy food demands, through an observation about the girl's unflappability, and, chillingly, to the threat that's serious enough to frighten her. Good stuff.

***

And speaking of fish fingers and custard:

haven't reached YouTube yet, but so far I've found via Google:

http://www.fishincustard.co.uk/home.html - a consulting firm or something that helps business fish deal with their distracting custard stuff so they can concentrate on non-custard stuff. Seems to treat the combo of fish and custard as if it's already an established metaphor. I'm assuming this isn't a fake site like the Torchwood House one etc.

http://www.astray.com/recipes/?show=Fish%20custard - a recipe that, it's claimed, "shows true New England ingenuity."

http://importfood.com/recipes/thaifishcustard.html - receipe that presumably shows true Thai ingenuity. Also http://www.orientmag.com/recipe6.asp - steamed fish and banana custard.

That's before I start hitting all the Doctor Who-related results.

I think I need to go to Safeway now for fish and custard.

The Doctor's "craving" and the eating sequence generally is "a callback to the dialogue between the Doctor and Lazarus over "nibbles." The Doctor seemed to be talking about a need to eat after regeneration. Maybe Ten should have eaten the apple in the dressing gown.

Also, the whole food scene, aside from showcasing the Doctor at his wonkiest, is a great introduction to Amelia. She's capable of going with it, following the outrageous demands of the raggedy Doctor as if determined to find the food he won't spit out, unfazed by it all. This established a rapport between the two characters and adds impact the Doctor's remark about the crack being scary to the otherwise unflappable little girl.

Eight episodes in, I still love this episode. Still a 10.

New Who Review Redux: The End of Time

mavarin — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:49:03 GMT

David Tennant's swansong as the Doctor, The End of Time, was originally broadcast over Christmas 2009 and New Year's Day 2010 in the UK. I will combine my two reviews in this entry.

On Part One (25 Dec 2009, 11:48 pm):

I had to debate between a 9 and a 10 and ended up with 10. Epic, emotional, intricate, funny in spots, with WTF moments I trust RTD to (mostly) clear up by the end of Part 2. I especially loved the Doctor and Wilf in the cafe, and the way the Master can be more damaged than ever, and yet still share a strong bond of kinship and shared experience with the Doctor.

Aside from the character stuff, all of which I loved (well, except for the ER claim), what really impressed me was the way it all fits with everything we've seen from Rose on, and to a lesser extent all the way back to An Unearthly Child. The Doctor has always had a difficult relationship with his own people, and now we see a Lord President every bit as corrupt as past Gallifreyan villains. In "The Parting of the Ways," Rose spoke of the distant future as happening right now, and here the Ood speak of time in much the same way. In "Last of the Time Lords," the Master spoke of the combination of human and Time Lord, a new Gallifrey and a new Time Lord empire. It was hard to see any such things in his Toclafane scheme, but now we can deduce that he was being manipulated by the High Council, somehow. Donna's special relationship with the Doctor finds its echo as Wilf reconnects with him in her place. We finally see who (besides Tracie Simpson) picked up the ring. We learn what the four beats represent, aside from the bass line of Ron Grainer's theme. We find out more or less definitively why the Doctor didn't regenerate at the beginning of "Turn Left," which just leaves us with the Seventh Doctor's demise to explain away. It's all clicking into place, and yet, there are parts of the saga that RTD admits he did not plan from the beginning, much as it seems that way now.

The one thing I might have knocked off a point for and didn't was the Master's new energy bolt ability and the whole resurrection potion thing. It seems a little beyond the pale for a Time Lord. Yet this is a character who survived numerous certain death situations with no explanation, who stole the body of poor Tremas, who was infected by the cheetah planet, who existed briefly as a gooey snake creature, and who was deliberately brought back from -- where did the TARDIS version of the Eye of Harmony lead? The Matrix? the Time Vortex? -- to fight a Time War, and apparently to engineer Gallifrey's return. I'm not sure where the limits are to believability for a character with such an extreme history of transformations and unlikely resurrections. A few words were thrown in to explain it, sort of, and I'm prepared to let it slide. It's worth it to see John Simm's extraordinary performance of the Master as he goes over the edge, plummeting much deeper into Crazytown than before.

Oh, and I hated the repeated claim that Obama was somehow going to fix the world's economy with a single speech. Having endured a year of greed and ignorance and worthless compromise getting in the way of the President's campaign promises, I just found that bit rather painful.

I have a strong suspicion about the identity of Wilf's mysterious contact. Please let it be the one major character RTD hasn't brought back yet - and I don't mean the Rani!

***
On President Obama's appearance as a character:

I wasn't bothered by the Obama appearance per se. The Queen has appeared, why not Obama? What irritated me was the actor's lack of resemblance, even from the back and with face obscured. Also, it would have been nice if his name were pronounced correctly by all of the characters, particularly Trinity Wells.

More than that, it bugged me that several characters expected an American President to fix the world's economy with a single speech. Save the world from the Daleks or the Sycorax? That can be done in a day or two, if you're the cleverest alien in the Universe and have the right friends. Instantly fix unemployment, homelessness, housing markets, the credit market, etc., which presumably requires widespread and systematic change on the part of real people and institutions? That's a very different kettle of credit cards.

That's probably the satirical point, of course, that some people credit certain charismatic politicians with the miraculous ability to fix the world's problems. But from this side of the pond, where different people demonize those same politicians, such a depiction feels painfully ironic. And this holds true whether the politician in question is Obama or Palin or President Summers, former VP to Winters.

***

On the variance between actual plot resolutions and the ones anticipated by fans (1 Jan 2010, 2:46 am):

From time to time I find myself obsessing about some trailer or cliffhanger, e.g. "How could the Doctor see Jack and dematerialize anyway?" or "How does RTD get away having the Doctor regenerate when David Tennant has further appearances to make?" or indeed "Who is the woman in white?" If the story when it aired fit the one in my head too closely, I think I'd be disappointed. I want RTD, the Moff et al. to do something clever, something I didn't think of.

I suspect, however, that some fans want the opposite. Confronted with a cliffhanger, they apply their knowledge of the show and personal preferences to come up with a particular scenario they want. If that's what the show then provides, then well and good. The fan's cleverness is validated, the preference satisfied. Anything else feels "wrong." This is not the version of Doctor Who they signed up for, the optimal Doctor Who they've constructed for themselves. Therefore it's rubbish - no plot, all spectacle, too much science, not enough science, or whatever it is that offends their sensibilities. My husband tonight mentioned that on another site fans complained that there was too much running in EoT. Too much running? In Doctor Who? Isn't that a defining characteristic of the entire 1963 to present series? It seems a bit late to start complaining about that now!

BBC America is running the Tenth Doctor's stories back to back at the moment, and we had Tooth and Claw on earlier. Queen Victoria declares angrily that "This is not my world," despite the evidence of her eyes, and later banishes the Doctor and Rose from her empire and her world. I guess a queen might think she can get away with that. If the real world doesn't match the one in her head, she can order the world to change. The rest of us don't have that luxury. It's not up to us to dictate what Doctor Who should be, or what the optimal Doctor Who is. Our choice is whether to judge the show based on what it is, and appreciate its variability, or to judge it based on how closely it resembles the version of the show we've built up in our own heads.

For me that's an easy choice. Like Jon [Blum], I have occasional reservations about some plot point or character detail; but overall I'm pleased to be surprised, episode after episode.

***

On Part Two (2 Jan 2010, 4:05 am):

I don't think I'm quite ready to decide how much I love this. I gave it a 9, but I could easily have gone for 10, just as last time I gave it a 10 but almost went with 9.

There isn't anything here I don't like, with the possible exception of the rescue-down-stairs. There's nothing inherently wrong with lightening the mood for a moment with a bit of slapstick, but it wasn't to my taste.

The other night I wrote that this show should be judged on its own merits, not on how well it conforms to the movie in your head. Implicit in that is the idea that it's better for the show to surprise than for it to meet expectations. Well, RTD surprised me, with Rassilon returning from the deep past, a fact revealed in a single throwaway line; in our mysterious Woman in White not being identified; in the Master helping to save the Universe and not being the source of the life-ending knocking; in Martha marrying Mickey; the tribute from Ood Sigma; and in the purpose of the Doctor's farewell tour, as foreshadowed by all those set reports last spring. I truly thought the banging on the barrels was the knocking, so Wilf tapping the glass was a major surprise for me. (Too bad I already submitted a trivia question on Facebook that says the Master knocked four times. Oops!)

Beyond that, some parts were flat-out wonderful, such as the Doctor trying to convince the Master that he doesn't need to own the Universe, and their mutual pondering of how their lives have been affected by the noise in the Master's head. Wilf and the Doctor were fantastic together on the spaceship, and I loved Wilf for trying to spare the Doctor from making the fatal rescue. Donna finally gets married for real, and her dead father inadvertently solves her ongoing money issue with the Doctor's help. Lovely!

Oh, and no reboot or reset. Hooray!

Yeah, I love it. I don't have any serious issues with a single moment of it, although I do wonder why the regeneration was so destructive. Was it the radiation? The effect of the delay as the Tenth Doctor made his final rounds? I don't know. Maybe I don't have to know.

No, wait. There is one little niggle. The Eleventh Doctor's first moments were uncomfortably similar to Ten's, with the inventory of body parts, forgetting "something important" and near-delight at the TARDIS in crash mode. Yes, the Doctor pretty much always checks himself out after regeneration, but I thought the actual monologue here was a little derivative. That surprises me, because Steven Moffat (I assume he wrote the end bit) is a highly original writer, most of the time. Still, Matt Smith was a lot of fun to watch, particularly the way he moved those amazingly expressive fingers.

I guess the few niggles I've mentioned are why, if I have to quantify it, it's only a 9 for me. Your mileage, as always, may vary. And probably does.

***

On the drumming in the Masters head as a viable retcon (3 Jan 2010, 4:19 am):

Both Yana and the Simm-Master mentioned that the drums have been getting louder and louder recently. Presumably it was easier to cope a few centuries back, when it was a minor background noise, than it is now, when it is designed to force the Master to act on it. Ever had problems with a song stuck in your head? I don't know about you, but for me it can be a real problem sometimes. (Also tinnitus.) If my mind is engaged elsewhere, it's not so bad, but other times it can be very annoying and distracting. Imagine Delgado being afflicted with a relatively benign level of the sound in his head, Ainley with substantially more, and Simm with it turned up to eleven. No wonder it's practically all he thinks about these days, whereas in the old days he didn't consider it worth mentioning. Not when we were listening in, anyway!

Comparing the Tenth Doctor's farewell tour before regenerating with past regeneration delays (5 Jan 2010, 5:14 pm):

There was some discussion earlier comparing the long-delayed regeneration here with the one in Planet of the Spiders. My Target novelization is out of reach behind a stack of boxes, but I watched the end of the aired story last night. Just before the TARDIS materializes in the Doctor's lab at UNIT, Sarah Jane remarks that it's been three weeks since the Doctor disappeared. Assuming it didn't take more than a day or so to get to the cave of crystals on Metebelis 3, The Doctor spent nearly three weeks dying of severe radiation poisoning (or something along those lines). Or did he? The Third Doctor may only have been "lost in the Time Vortex" for a day or so of his personal time, even though three weeks passed back at UNIT. We don't really know how much time he spent not regenerating, or why he needed a little push from K'Anpo to get things moving again.

In the present story, the Doctor makes seven or eight stops that we know about (including the visit to Geoff Noble, and probably another stop to check lottery results) before his difficulties become so great that he can hardly walk. None of those encounters take more than a few minutes on screen, but let's assume there's a certain amount of set up time - researching when a visit to Martha and Mickey will do the most good, tracking Jack down, etc. Even with all that, it probably doesn't take more than a day or so of his personal time for him to do all that stuff. Given the lag time in Planet of the Spiders, that doesn't seem unreasonable.

****

Now:

I'm a little surprised to see that I didn't give either part of The End of Time a ten, considering how much I loved it then, and how many times I've watched it since. Still, I think it's the right rating. This may be one of my favorite stories, because certain scenes are astonishingly good and emotionally satisfying; and yet The End of Time has its flaws, enough to prevent a "perfect" rating.

And that's enough for tonight. Next time: "The Eleventh Hour."

Karen

New Who Review Redux: Dreamland

mavarin — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:20:19 GMT

My harshest review since Gallifrey Base set up shop last summer was for "Dreamland," an animated story originally aired in one twelve minute episodes followed by a series of six minute ones. Here was my reaction:

I only gave it a 5 (out of 10), I'm afraid, which is by far the worst rating I would give any Tenth Doctor story to date. Not that I expected it to be great, given the medium, but The Infinite Quest was far better.

The backgrounds in Dreamland were very nice and atmospheric, but the character designs were annoyingly crude, and even worse when they moved. At times the sound seemed a little off, so that DT didn't quite sound like the Doctor.

There was a long argument/discussion in the Waters of Mars thread about how much characterization the Bowie Base crew got. In Dreamland there was far less. Maybe I'd pick up more upon rewatching, but as it is I know next to nothing about the two companions du jour. Again, this is partly due to the limitations of the format, with all those short episodes - but here, too, The Infinite Quest was more effective in making characters interesting in the space of a few minutes.

Good stuff - I liked the kitchen sink approach of including lots of the old American sf cliches - the gray aliens, the MIB, helicopters, Area 51, Roswell, etc. There were some fun lines of dialogue, and I approve of the Doctor refusing to allow genocide, and saying the the Russians "are nice." Considering what's going on in the character's life immediately before and after this story, the Doctor's dismissive response when his life was threatened was nicely underplayed.

But overall, there doesn't seem to be much meat to this story. Maybe there was no room for meat. I'll just have to wait for Christmas, and the next heaping helping of Doctor Who goodness.

***

Now: unusually for me, I haven't rewatched this. I'm not even sure where we might have a copy of it to watch. I'd really like to like it, because it's Doctor Who and I respect the writer, director and actors behind it. More likely, though, the pacing and the visuals will always get in the way of my appreciation.

Karen

New Who Review Redux: The Waters of Mars

mavarin — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:02:07 GMT

I haven't posted here in nearly a year and a half, so let's do something about that. I'm going to cannibalize my posts from the Gallifrey Base rate threads, so as to collect them in one public, easily accessible place. First up: "The Waters of Mars", from November 2009. A note to non-Who fans: you're certain to be confused by numerous references to past stories and the use of title abbreviations. Sorry about that - I was writing for an audience that knows all this stuff.

As written 17 Nov 2009, 2:06 am:

Wow. It’s been a long time since my rating of an episode was lower than the overall average. I gave this a seven, and seriously considered a six. (Over 79% of the votes in the Gallifrey Base were higher than this, nearly 31% ratings it nine out of ten.)

Understand, I’m not saying there’s anything actually wrong, per se, with the writing, acting, direction, design or effects. Not much, anyway. I do think RTD and Phil Ford went overboard on making Adelaide such a disciplinarian with her crew as to be actively unpleasant, and very nearly unlikeable. I find it hard to root for a character like that.

And I'm not a big fan of the largely unexplained Flood and its representative monsters. Some people (who are not me) really appreciate a nice scary monster that goes around killing people for no adequately explored reason. The Flood monsters like water, they make water, so they want to kill humans who are 60% water so they can go to a planet that has lots of water, even though they make their own. Uh-huh.

Otherwise, there is nothing I can point to in this story and criticize on the basis of anything but sheer personal preference. This is a base-under-siege story, like many of the Troughton serials, and I’m afraid they’re not my favorites, either. I’m just not a fan of locking characters into a confined space and then picking them off one by one. It annoyed me in "Voyage of the Damned," and slightly less so in "42" and "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit." See? Personal taste, all the way.

What redeems the story for me is the exploration of what happens to the Doctor as he is pushed to the breaking point in the conflict between his desire to help and his adherence to the Laws of Time. He spends nearly the whole story fighting an internal battle, unable to stop himself from offering bits of information and advice, unable to walk away from trouble and the certain death of people he admires. When he finally breaks free of his principles, putting human survival ahead of a vital but cruelly impersonal standard of behavior, he rationalizes his rash and manic actions. Having won through in innumerable tough situations, having skirted the edges of interfering with fixed events with no harm done in Pompeii and possibly elsewhere, he tells himself he can get away with this larger transgression, that he is now in a position to change the rules because there is no one else to call him to account for it. But you can see in his eyes, even as he displays his new, dangerously arrogant attitude to Adelaide, that he knows he’s pushing his luck and then some. (I found the "little people" remark jarringly out of character, though, coming from someone who told Lazarus that there's no such thing as an ordinary human.) The bravado collapses as soon as Adelaide thwarts him, and the consequences of his actions begin to come home to him. That’s a really interesting journey for the Doctor to make, although it’s painful to watch at times.

So yeah. Good episode, excellent design work, acting, direction and effects, and a presumably a vital prelude to the final two specials with the Tenth Doctor. But it’s never going to be one of my favorite stories.

About things left unexplained (17 Nov 2009, 6:16 am):

I can see that we don't always have to know everything about the monster. (We know precious little about the monster in "Midnight," for example.) But I personally don't find them more interesting or intriguing because of that. I prefer an antagonist who expresses a point of view and motives that go beyond "kill humans...Earth pretty," such as Davros, the Master, Blon, and even Caan and Sec. That's okay, though. One of the strengths of this show is the variety of approaches in setting, antagonists, tone, storytelling and so on. There's bound to be stories that don't appeal to me as much because of the choices made, and are loved by other fans on the very same basis.

About a minor character (17 Nov 2009, 1:44 pm)

In the middle of a crisis, Yuri is relieving tension by running an amusing video of his brother, and sharing his amusement with his quarantined friend. Add that to Yuri's "No Trespassers" stunt at the beginning and the handholding and exchanged looks with Mia and you have a nice little thumbnail sketch of the character - a competent, loving, lighthearted guy who enjoys seeing the humor in a situation, and refuses to take a deadly serious situation deadly seriously until absolutely necessary.

We know next to nothing about Steffi and some of the others, but Yuri gets a bit more fleshing out.

About how the characters get inside the TARDIS with no time to spare (24 Nov 2009, 12:29 am):

There were, at most, two seconds between TARDIS materialization and the base's detonation. It's hard to tell exactly, because they did not show the TARDIS's arrival or play the engine sound very loudly. But given what we did see and hear, it seems likely that the Tenth Doctor did the same thing by remote control of Gadget that the Ninth Doctor did for Rose at the beginning of PotW: materialize around the target rather than beside it. The Mars survivors had no time to walk into the TARDIS, or even be told to do so. Therefore the TARDIS simply appeared around them. No choice involved. This seems to be borne out by the survivors' expressions in those final pre-detonation moments.

And once they arrive and step out of the TARDIS, Adelaide demands an explanation, the result of which convinces her that the Doctor's sudden about-face was a bad decision, and too dangerous to the future to be allow to stand. The Doctor refuses to be the responsible one, so she takes the decision out of this hands, with the same discipline and commitment she showed on Mars. The only difference is that back on Mars, she did her best to save the mission and her people. Now the only mission to be saved is her granddaughter's.

Now:

My seven out of ten rating is probably a little harsh in this case, but subjectively it's about right for me even now. Unsympathetic characters and bleak resolutions tend to do that to me.

K.

Austin Zombies Were Just the Beginning

mavarin — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 08:49:13 GMT

From a Phoenix tv station tonight, this breaking news about the zombie threat:

Apparently those naughty zombies are in Phoenix as well as Austin. And so I've gotta ask: are the zombies just targeting Republicans, or is Tucson at risk as well?

Silly Chase Scene Video

mavarin — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 01:34:25 GMT

Emininemmy Hill

Via thecalituckyohioan

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Season Four and More - My Doctor Who Quiz

mavarin — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:05:40 GMT

I wrote this today. In fact, it's pretty much all I've accomplished today, if you can call it an accomplishment. I hope someone likes it.

Karen

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

Quiz redone Tuesday due to one answer that got messed up somehow. Sorry about that!

See also:

The Moment Has Been Prepared For.

The Next Doctor - Preliminary review

mavarin — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 03:44:30 GMT

Adapted from my entry in the DWF rate thread.

Well, I debated between a 4 and a 5 (out of 5) rating for this, and ultimately went with a four. Much of it was excellent, but a few aspects of it could have been better. I must say, though, the more I watch it and mull it over, the more the perceived flaws start to fade.

I find it interesting, and a bit frustrating, that some fans fail to pay attention to the details of an episode, and then complain that something doesn't make sense. For example:

What was the point of children working? Revenge. It was not necessarily the most efficient way to complete the work, but it suited Hartigan's purpose of getting back at London's children for her years of cleaning up after them. Before the kids were brought in, the Cybermen had to set up the treadmills and so on, and Miss Hartigan had to lead the men of charity into a trap and then get them to collect the children. The men of charity - who ignored and possibly abused Hartigan - and the children were then slated to die, completing her revenge. The Cyberleader correctly saw that passion and revenge were her motivations, and that she was screwed up emotionally.

It's also worth noting that lower class children in that era really were put to work under fairly brutal conditions.

How did the Cybermen know about...? The Doctor said that the information on the infostamps was probably stolen from the Daleks. They really do know an awful lot about the Doctor! (I'm not sure how they managed to photograph the Doctor in some of the incidents featured on the infostamp, however, including the incident with the Racnoss and the seconds following the death of Astrid P. and Max C..)

What about that dimension thingy the Doctor used at the end? Wasn't that awfully convenient / DEM? How do you think the Cybermen got to London to begin with?

Wasn't there supposed to be a huge twist at the end? What happened to that? I believe that was the revelation and rescue of Jackson's son.

Weren't the Cybermen a little pointless this time out? No. Aside from being the catalyst to the Jackson Lake and Miss Hartigan storylines, they were a contrast to the emotionalism of each, and commenters on Hartigan in particular, and menaced London far beyond what Hartigan could do on her own. And Hartigan, in turn, managed to avoid losing her emotions despite Cyberizing, and take control of the Cybermen in a way that has never been done before.

Overall...

I personally loved the whole Jackson Lake storyline. It was very touching, well written and well acted. I particularly liked the Doctor's explanation to Jackson (and how great that it was an ordinary fob watch but STILL meant something!) and the scene at the end. The first time through I was a little disappointed it was resolved so quickly, but really it lasted through half the story, with a final additional resolution at the end. And I agree with RTD that artificiality preserving a mystery or other conflict by not letting characters communicate what they know does more harm than good.

Rosita was good, as far as she went, but in the end we don't know what much about her, which is a bit of a loss. I would also have liked to know most about the sources of Miss Hartigan's major malfunction, and how she got from downtrodden washerwoman and possible harlot to poised, well-dressed Lady in Red.

I have no major problem with the Cyberking / giant robot thing, except that the Doctor identifies the latter as "dreadnought class." Huh? Where did that come from? The Cybershades were interesting looking if you looked closely, not masks on gorilla suits as some people have said, but almost like crepe paper, which is at least original. I liked the leaping and speed of them. Do we really need to know exactly what they are and how they were made? Probably not.

Good enough, RTD. For me at least, there was easily enough great stuff here to more than make up for my quibbles. I'd rank this one well above "Voyage of the Damned," and probably slightly above "The Runaway Bride." "The Christmas Invasion" is one of my favorite stories, and for me still ranks as the best of the Christmas eps, by far.

Karen