Monthly Archives: January 2007

Eight

  • Reading time:5 mins read

I’ve said this before; the new series seems to go a long way toward redeeming the TV movie. From a continuity perspective, very little in it seems controversial anymore (“half human” issues aside); as a production, it’s always been great (Vancouver aside). The only obvious problem remaining is the pacing. The story isn’t even all that bad in the abstract; it just isn’t told well, getting caught up in procedure instead of development. Indeed, it’s full of great little moments — the kinds of scenes that people often claim to lift dry (and poorly paced) stories like Genesis of the Daleks out of the mire. And it’s these that tend to stick in my mind — the “shoes” scene and the glass-morph scene and the introduction — rather than the narrative faults.

Honestly, time has turned it into just another Doctor Who story. Any remaining continuity niggles are hardly any worse than Brain of Morbius or Mawdryn Undead; any script issues aren’t all that different from other classic stories; the acting is almost certainly superior to half the classic serials; the set design and photography are amongst the best ever. And to top it off, it’s introduced a bunch of ideas that — through their unconventionality — have in retrospect enriched the continuity more than the whole final decade or so of the original series.

So. Yeah. It’s certainly earned its place. Still. If I were to play script doctor, I’d suggest the next draft might go like this:

At the start, it would have made a lot more sense for the Doctor to have been fatally wounded in the crossfire, and to have regenerated right there — maybe when Chang Lee ran out to call the ambulance. Chang Lee could be directing the guys with the stretcher: “He’s right over… here?” And there McGann is, instead of McCoy. The attendants throw him in the back of the bus; Chang Lee just stares, confused. By the time they get to the hospital, the Doctor is ice cold; they deliver him straight to the morgue.

Perhaps before the ambulance arrived, Chang Lee rifled through the Doctor’s pockets — finding the TARDIS key, the watch, the Sonic Screwdriver. The Ambulance leaves him behind; he stares after it for a while, then turns to survey the TARDIS — this huge, blue… thing, that just saved his life.

Grace — how would she come in, if not in the operation theater? Perhaps she’s called in to do an autopsy? That would work. Would also seem to fit Fox (and her apparent Scully template) a hell of a lot better.

This already speeds up the episode a bunch. Imagine the Doctor waking on the autopsy table, and the introduction that would be. She could be shocked to discover that the John Doe was completely uninjured, despite supposedly being a multiple bullet wound. She could have her Puccini, and have the Doctor make his comment.

This would also save a hell of a lot of running around with the Doctor trying to convince her of things. It could even be sort of an intimate introduction, in place of his freaking her out entirely. To save even more time from the amnesia, he could quickly explain some of the necessary plot details, and she could be something other than a complete bint by observing that he just came to life and seems to have two hearts, so might be worth listening to with at least one ear.

Maybe a scene where he asks for his clothes; they’ve been burned or discarded; he can’t find anything except a ridiculous T-shirt and flip-flops, and has to wear those until she smuggles him back to the TARDIS — from which he discovers the Master has escaped, yet which in his place has a new and unexpected occupant in the form of Chang Lee (who might or might not make his presence known).

Maybe Chang Lee sneaks out while the Doctor and Grace are rummaging around, changing, and talking about the plot; he runs off to do his thing. The Master homes in on something or other Chang Lee snatched from the Doctor’s pocket; when he finds the kid, he does his “you will obey me” routine, and has a minion. By the time he leads the Master back to the TARDIS, the Doctor and Grace have moved on to look for the beryllium clock.

The Master can then try to steal the TARDIS; it won’t go anywhere thanks to the beryllium thing. And then he realizes he couldn’t go anywhere anyway, as the TARDIS is coded to the Doctor’s DNA — so he’d need the Doctor’s body. Thus he dreams up a neat plan: open up the Eye of Harmony conduit, thereby sending the Cloister bell ringing and the fabric of reality all inside out. Doing this will give the Doctor some problems to work out, with the world around him falling apart, yet will ensure that he returns to the TARDIS — where the Master can use the Eye of Harmony to aid him in taking over the Doctor’s body. If his plan works, great — he’s alive again, and outta there. If not, hey. What a swell final gesture, huh?

The Doctor has his misadventures on the way out and back, has his struggle; something previously establish intervenes to cause the Master’s body transference to go awry, causing him to be absorbed into the Eye of Harmony and the Doctor to be left unharmed. The Doctor muses on the theme of rebirth then makes his goodbyes, with the promise of an impending BBC/Fox/Universal TV series in the wings…

The Birth of Excellence

  • Reading time:5 mins read

So the broad consensus is that television has finally reached its golden age. Somehow, magically, it doesn’t necessarily suck anymore. People have figured out how to use the medium to do something substantial and engaging, and while not every show follows through on this potential, or does it well, the artistry is loose — and some damned excellent things have been coming of it: The Sopranos, Lost, Battlestar Galactica. Most people seem to trace this evolution down to the mid-’90s, in particular to The X-Files. A few nerds throw around Babylon 5. I recently saw a proposition that it was a three-step process begun with Twin Peaks (showing that something substantial could be done with the medium), developed in The X-Files (showing that an involving long-form narrative was possible), and refined in Buffy (moving that narrative focus from plot to character development).

What strikes me as just as important, though, is the development of DVD. Again we can thank The X-Files for establishing precedent of DVD compilations; now with shows like Lost, and shows developed straight for pay channels like The Sopranos, that otherwise have no direct commercial value, television is produced with the end user — and an end product — in mind. Whereas the ’90s shows demonstrated the artistry, DVD provides a framework; a structure. Shows are designed to be cohesive, coherent long-form narrative units that people can pull off their shelves and watch, enjoy, as a single work, with the actual broadcast little more than a taster for the eventual consumer product. I’ve even heard cases of networks developing and showing series at a loss or near the break even point (though I’m scraping my mind to remember which ones, and where I read this), with the long-term expectation of DVD revenue, once the ratings and word of mouth have made their rounds, to make up the balance. As a result, TV shows are more and more made as a long-form work, that can be watched over and over, rather than for serialization.

I’ve said before that television is, in theory, the novel to film’s short story or novella. Whereas films are self-encapsulated, short narratives with a single premise, meant to be taken in at a sitting, both novels and television are serial formats. Many novels even start off as a series of short stories (Catch-22), or as newspaper or magazine serials (Musashi, anything Dickens). It’s only when they’re compiled into a single, tangible volume that they are assessed and evaluated as complete, legitimate works. And though there is a certain elegance to the short story or novella, revolving as they do around a single conceit, there is a reason why the novel is considered the true test of literary skill: as a serial, it has the scope and structure to explore plot, character, and theme with a nuance impossible in the shorter works. Of course, most novels still suck; that’s what happens, though.

What DVD has done is allow television that objective, tangible distance. Long-form works now can be compiled and assessed as a whole, in the same sense that they provide a target structure for the narrative. It’s just a strange coincidence that it happens to have come around immediately after the artistry. I think it’s the final critical step for the medium, in that previously that objective distance was impossible to attain. Even with the occasionsal VHS release, television was transitory. There’s a reason why the BBC archives (among others) were systematically wiped; just as life doesn’t become a story until it has an ending, a serial doesn’t become a novel until it’s bound. You have to be reminded to value the fleeting because it is fleeting, rather than ignore it because you can’t grab hold of it and place it on an altar.

Film, it got its act together years ago. Decades ago. Before sound, even — though it wasn’t until the New Wave that it got all self-aware and critical. Reason? It’s already self-encapsulated. You don’t need it bound; you don’t need it on your shelf; you don’t need to have it compiled for you, because it’s brief and simple enough to be instantly comprehensible, and easily exploited. (Relatively speaking, that is.) I think there’s a reason why in film the main artistic force is perceived as the director (Charlie Kaufman aside), whereas with television it tends to be the writer. Each dictates the essental narrative structure of the work. Since film is comparably simple and short, each shot, each visual juxtaposition is of greater narrative importance. Since television sprawls, the basic narrative block becomes the chapter rather than the scene — meaning an increased reliance on script as a source of content and momentum, rather than rote imagery.

Funny thing is, soap opera was way ahead of its time. All it really lacks is sophistication and an end structure — neither of which were even developed until a few years ago.

A Slime for All Seasons: Videogames and Classism

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part twelve of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “OPINION: Yuji Horii was Right to Opt for DS”.

You’ve probably heard this Dragon Quest business; in a move surprising to professional analysts everywhere, producer Yuji Horii has decided to go with the most popular piece of dedicated gaming hardware in generations for the next installment of the most important videogame franchise in Japan. If people are bewildered, it’s not due to the apparent rejection of Sony (whose hardware was home to the previous two chapters). After the mediocre performance of the PSP and the bad press regarding the PS3 launch, Sony has become a bit of a punching bag for the industry’s frustrations. Fair or not, losing one more series – however important – hardly seems like news anymore.

So no, what’s confounding isn’t that Horii has changed faction; it’s that he appears to have changed class, abandoning home consoles – in particular, the sure and sanctified ground of the no-longer-next generation systems – for a handheld, commonly seen as the lowest caste of dedicated game hardware.

Braid

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Oh hey. I just realized that Braid now has a website. It was only the Slamdance business, and related links, that led me to it. And on this site, we find some much-closer-to-finished screenshots:

1 2 3 4

The sprite art isn’t exactly what I was expecting from the GDC demo. I think I’ll have to see it in motion. The world, though — man. Yeah, this seems to be working out. Is it in widescreen, or is there a menu cropped off?

Curious thing now, with the game looking so polished: its deconstruction doesn’t seem so obvious anymore. When it was all sketchy, it kind of wore its commentary on its sleeve. Now that it looks more like a “real”, invested game, I wonder how clear its subversive qualities will be. If anything, this stands to make the game even more subversive.

Gestures and Measures

  • Reading time:8 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part eleven of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

About a year ago NextGen published an article in which I groused about the early speculation about the Wii. The point, I said, wasn’t that we could now have real-time lightsaber duels; it was the extra layer of nuance that the Wiimote added on top of our familiar grammar – kind of the way analog control made 3D movement a hair less awkward. The point of motion control, I said, wasn’t to replace current control systems; it was to augment them, thereby to make them more flexible. A little more powerful, a little more intuitive.

Well, I was half right.

Losing the plot

  • Reading time:9 mins read

I think the thing I enjoy about the black and white period of Doctor Who is that it’s so much more ambitious than the later eras. Ambition returns in a form during the ’80s, though for different reasons and to different results. There’s a distinct difference, though, between the day-to-day approach to stories during the ’60s and ’70s.

During the Hartnell era, nearly every story was high-concept speculative fiction of some sort. Here’s the story where everything is as alien as it possibly can be; here’s the one where the TARDIS and its occupants shrink; here’s the one where we revisit a location hundreds of years later, to see the consequences of the Doctor’s actions. Even when they’re not speculative, they’re still high-concept: here’s the one introducing a meddling counterpart to the Doctor; here’s the musical; here’s the ridiculously long and serious epic.

Troughton curtailed that trend a bit, with a bigger focus on pulp “monster of the week” storytelling. There was still room for a few speculative stories, like an acid trip to the land of fiction or to a place where all the wars in history are being fought at once. In general, though, energy was devoted to creating new creatures to frighten the kids — preferably recurring ones. Repetitious, yet fun.

Pertwee turned the show into a spy show with aliens and mad scientists, with the Doctor as the hero with the cape and the gadgets; every week there was a new evil scheme to foil. The one story that’s really stood out to me during this era is Inferno — a story where the Doctor visits a parallel Earth in order to witness what happens when he fails, then has to relive the nightmare back in his own reality. It’s almost like a Twilight Zone episode. Though the costumes and set design kill it for me, Carnival of Monsters also is pretty imaginative; it deals with the TARDIS materializing inside a miniaturized habitat trucked around the galaxy by a couple of carnies. Likewise, The Green Death is basically an allegory for the environmental movement.

Tom Baker is kind of where the series loses itself. The early, Hinchcliffe era is dominated by pastiches of whatever Hammer horror movie happened to be in theaters at the moment: travel from Sherlock Holmes Land to The Mummy’s Tomb Land to Frankenstein Land. Slap onto that a deliberate attempt to arbitrarily rewrite series continuity for short-term dramatic ends, and you’ve got a horrible mess — one which, to note, the hardcore fans generally consider the “golden era” of the show. It’s horribly dull; instead of putting creative energy into new concepts to explore, or even into creating new and original monsters to play with, or even-even new threats to London every week, this era funnels its energy into tearing down and rebuilding the series itself — whereas the stories framed by this new and hypothetically improved series are both unoriginal and told in the driest, most self-serious manner possible. The arrogance and ill handling of this era, more than anything, are what bother me about the ’70s stories.

After the BBC dumped Hinchcliffe and Holmes, with the suggestion that the show pull its head out of its ass and do something positive for a change, Graham Williams took over and generally lightened the tone of the show, turning it into a campy romp. He introduced K-9 and Romana, and hired Douglas Adams first to write for then to manage the writing of the show. The series became loopy and irreverent, and although the production values began to go down the toilet, at least the series was original and vibrant again.

Baker’s final season coincided with a complete change of direction for the show, with the oft-reviled, usually misunderstood John Nathan-Turner taking over the show. Granted, JNT had a lot of weird ideas about the show; he was a master at getting the show made, not at managing the creative side. As far as he was concerned, that was the script editor’s job. Whenever he was graced with a script editor with a strong plan for the series, the show was nearly as strong as it ever was. When the script editor was an uninspired douchebag who was more interested in squabbling with the producer than in drawing out a plan (or even managing the scripts), the show was about as awful as it ever was. Season eighteen was Bidmead’s turn, and his idea was an entire season dealing with the concept of entropy. The result: an uncannily consistent and well-conceived string of episodes, in some ways harking back to the Hartnell era.

When Davison came on board, the show was still coasting from JNT and Bidmead’s smash debut: full of intriguing experiments, carried by a continuing storyline, and even graced by a historical or two — for the first time since season four. It only took about a season, however, for new script editor Eric Saward to exert his own entropy on the series. Don’t draw out a solid plan, don’t seek out new and talented writers, don’t commission enough scripts, don’t edit what you do have — then see where the show winds up. It’s not that the rest of Davison’s and the start of Colin Baker’s eras don’t present some interesting ideas; it’s just that they’re isolated within a series that doesn’t know what it’s doing or why, and within individual scripts that haven’t received the care they require. By season twenty-two, there’s not a good story in the bunch. It’s this, more than anything, that gives Colin Baker the poor reputation he has — and it’s this that nearly got the series cancelled, for the first time.

After Michael Grade gave the production team a year and a half to get its act together (I believe those precise words were used, somewhere or other), they returned with Trial of a Time Lord. As it happens, Saward had spent that time doing… almost exactly nothing. He and JNT came up with a grand concept for the season; I guess that’s one thing. When production began, however, lo — no scripts! Last minute scrabbling and angst and anger. Result? Colin Baker got fired, and the show received one last warning.

What they did then — besides hire McCoy, who was at least very well-received at the time (even if current fans consider him the antichrist, for some reason) — was install a new script editor. As it turns out, Andrew Cartmel had almost no experience even with professional writing, much less managing the narrative direction of a TV series. What he had was a sense of perspective. His first season was a period of postmodern weirdness that fans couldn’t and can’t tolerate. Still, it was one of the most imaginative and downright intelligent periods in the show — the first breath of fresh air since Bidmead, and probably the most ballsy thing the show had done since the ’60s. Then when Cartmell settled in, watched all the old (surviving) episodes, and got a hang for what had been done before, he made a deliberate effort to bring back the ineffable qualities that he perceived had been lost over the intervening years (read: during the Hinchcliffe era). He put more of a focus on characters and long-term story, and went out of his way to find and nurture the brightest new talent available. Result: if you ignore the production and occasional casting problems, the series ended on a high nearly equal to its inception.

Now, the integrity and vision that Davies brings to the show should be self-evident. With his deliberate focus on “big ideas” (“Queen Victoria, a werewolf, and kung-fu monks!”) as a framework for character development and long-term continuity, it’s like a blend of the best from the ’60s and the late ’80s — albeit lacking a bit on the speculative end.

It’s this, here, that leads me to constantly compare the New Series to the ’60s series — before color, before the watering down and tearing down and budget and ego and focus problems. I seriously think you could watch the first six seasons, then the final three, then skip right to the new series, and not miss much of anything important.

Apply the above discussion to the Big Finish audio range and you’ll also be able to weed out the essential problems there. Whenever they do go for the big, brave, simple ideas — Scherzo or Natural History of Fear or Omega or Davros — they hit gold. Most of the time they’re content just to waddle forward with cookie cutter plots involving the Doctor and Companion arriving on X world with X political or social problem, that they need to solve. That Big Finish outwardly requests new writers not to specify what Doctor and they’re writing for should give an idea where they’re going wrong. It’s not about ideas or characters; it’s all about plots. Commodity.Words and actions taking up two hours of space, and leaving no one fictional or actual the better.

That’s not to say that Doctor Who has ever been particularly deep or substantial; it’s a children’s TV show. That, however, is all the more reason to be childlike. It’s a series about wonder and fear and finding new perpectives from which to view the world — all presented in the simplest, most digestible form. It’s basically a trainer for how to feel awe and respect for the world around us — and then to subvert it. When it (or anything else) doesn’t hit those goals, the world is deprived a little bit more.