Daily Archives: Tuesday, January 30th, 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.