Monthly Archives: July 2009

Brütal Irony

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published in, I believe, the September issue of Play Magazine.

Remember last year, when the newly-merged Activision Blizzard decided to shuck itself of properties unlikely to lead to a major franchise? Suddenly several high-profile one-off projects like Ghostbusters were left without a publisher. Though most quickly found a new host, Tim Schafer and Double Fine’s heavy metal adventure Brütal Legend was left grasping. In December the recently progressive Electronic Arts stepped up, and all seemed back on track.

Or maybe not.

Needs a hat.

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Yeah, this is sort of Top of the Pops with your host Pat Troughton as John Smith. Simultaneously very much like the First, Second, Fifth, and Seventh Doctors’ outfits; just a mild shuffle into dorkitude from Tennant, and, curiously enough, with elements of Eccleston.

Anyway, yes. About right. In retrospect, it’s fairly obvious; a take on your stereotypical dusty British professor. Curious that the character hadn’t quite hit it before.

I wonder if tweed will be back in, next year.

EDIT: So, with a day to reflect.

From his body language and the look in his eye, filtered through some of Moffat’s old comments, Matt Smith’s Doctor seems more investigative than action-oriented; like an actual traveling scientist, perhaps with a student in tow. In a way it harks back to the show’s original remit: Peter Cushing as Ian Chesterton as the Doctor, showing you the way it is.

I already had a good feeling about Matt Smith. Now this outfit, in its deliberately uncool way, is straight on its way to my favorite Doctor getup. If anything, it brings into relief the sharp style and extraverted yippiness of Tennant’s Doctor. David Tennant has been probably the best ambassador the show has had, or could ask for. And with thirteen masks, the Doctor can be trendy and sexy and dynamic sometimes; sure. But this, here — it peels away the layers and reveals the affably awkward teacher and researcher that, in my mind, the character is supposed to be.


George McFly … Matt Smith
“Would you still love me if I were no longer cool?” this depiction asks. “What if I weren’t so sure of myself?” And dude, yeah. I’d rather you weren’t, frankly. Just do your thing. Sincerity trumps all.

Considering what Moffat has said about his idea of the Doctor’s personality, and what he did in his earlier scripts, this all seems intentional.

Six months later

  • Reading time:2 mins read

The whole of Children of Earth is riddled with this awful futility.

The aliens had no need to be there. Had they needed the kids to eat or breed, it would have been horrible yet in some way reasonable: everything needs to try to survive somehow. As it turned out, there was no need for Frobisher to take his final actions. There was no need for the government to seek out and destroy Torchwood (with all the collateral damage involved there — Rupesh, etc.).

Just about every problem in this story is a result of vanity or weakness of character. It’s just plain stupid chaos. Gwen’s taped message in episode five puts a bullet point on that. And that’s pretty interesting!

Something else to point out, thematically — it’s only Jack sacrificing his own that solves the problem. This, after five episodes of everyone saying “it’s okay; take theirs, but not mine!” Earlier even Jack had his moment, with Ianto. Until then effectively no one is willing to make a sacrifice, no one is willing to take the burden. Even for the best characters, on some level it’s someone else’s problem.

Which I think illustrates what a strong character Frobisher is meant to be through most of this — he takes on all the responsibility that no one else wants, and he handles it. Much of that responsibility is awful, and poorly judged, but he absorbs it anyway, and takes it all to heart. He kind of fails the final test, but by that point it’s hard to much blame him.

This all, I assume, ties back into most of the characters being civil servants. Sort of a sci-fi Ikiru, except with less annoying structure.

Here comes Jack on a ruddy great tractor

  • Reading time:1 mins read

These last two episodes of Torchwood have been pretty brilliant about stealthily establishing elements that will be important later. Usually this business is fairly transparent. Here, it’s all so offhanded and apparently pragmatic that you don’t question; it doesn’t occur to you that these items or themes will come up again. The first scene in Cardiff, for instance, is Gwen at the ATM. Ah-ha, yes? That first child-event, each of the scenes they show serves several purposes, not least of which introducing characters. The only arbitrary kids given much screentime are those around Gwen’s ATM and the line not-arbitrarily blocking Rhys’s way.

So far, this is not only well-structured; it’s elegantly done. You’re so distracted by the characters and dialog that you don’t see the gears moving at all. However well-designed the machine, you still lose if it’s obviously mechanical.

Boom Boom Room

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Well. I had wondered why no one had gotten especially creative in killing Jack.

So far, it’s good. I know the rapturous noise people have been making, but this is simply the level that I’ve always expected from the show. It’s not exceeding expectations; just meeting them. That’s not such a bad thing, in that the show rarely has done so. Occasionally it’s done some neat things. But this is good.

This sort of feels like it should have been episode two of the first season. For most practical purposes, you can ignore everything from the second episode (also called, er, “Day One”), and plug this in, and you’re not missing much. It’s not too different a leap from “Invasion of the Bane” to Revenge of the Slitheen. Tosh and Owen are gone, and Gwen is cozier. That’s about it.

But yeah — this is Davies-style high-level writing. You know how every time the TARDIS turns up in one of his episodes, he has to screw with it? Take some bit of logic to a ridiculous extreme, to see what happens? Okay, here it’s going to fly on the freeway next to a car. And here it’s going to do this other thing you’d never thought about but, heck, I guess it’s plausible, given what we know.

Here, again, he’s not exceeding expectations. It’s more like he’s living up to three years of “why don’t they do X?” Which are the kinds of questions Chibnall never thought of asking. You never got that conceptual glee from him.

This feels kind of out-of-date in that respect, because if he’d done this in 2006, it would have been great. But at least the show’s finally getting around to it. If it keeps on at this rate, catching up, by the end it should be pretty interesting.

So there are a few things this episode does. One is, it says, okay, nobody ever used any of these toys I set out here. HERE is what I had in mind. And the other big one is concluding, “Oh, screw it. This didn’t work. Let’s tear it down and start again.” Though it only gradually gets around to that.

So. Okay. It’s doing a good job of fixing the show. We’ll see how this rolls on.