Yearly Archives: 2010

Mark of Excellence

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Last week I found myself commenting that, on the basis of the last couple of scripts, I was looking forward to a Mark Gatiss one for a change. I was rather surprised to find myself in that position.

As it turns out, my better judgment… was the better judge. This certainly is a Gatiss script here. Mind you, I hate it less than his previous scripts. Though it has gained a certain incoherence present in the previous Moffat script. How much of that is down to the direction, which is some of the worst since the series has returned, and how much the script, I can’t say and I’m not really bothered to sort out. There’s just something so generic about everything Gatiss writes. He doesn’t seem to know anything but pastiche.

I have never been impressed when people merely channel the thoughts and ideas of others and wear them as a badge to brand themselves or lend their own words legitimacy. It feels intellectually lazy, and as such it tends to bore me. Which is one reason I’m not all that impressed with Neil Gaiman, as well as he tends to choose his words. He doesn’t so much create his own worlds as he cherry picks references that he figures his audience will appreciate, or perhaps rather that fit into the distinct cultural trope that he means to evoke, and then rather than breaking them down or analyzing them or undermining them in some way as to create a new argument or perspective, he kind of lets them sit there and speak for themselves. “You like these elements?” he asks. “Well, you’ll really love my work, because it contains all of these features!”

To get back to Who, that’s what I get out of much of Robert Holmes’s writing. A few stories from that era sidestep the problem, and come off to me as a little less obvious. I like The Hand of Fear, and The Android Invasion, and The Sontaran Experiment. Each of those is a little weird, and doesn’t quite do everything as it is supposed to. The Deadly Assassin is also rather a startling divergence from form. It’s got something of its own to say. By and large, though, I feel like the era is trying to impress and placate me simply by evoking things that I don’t care about. At least, not in their own right.

I’ll accept that Moffat was just settling in with his first couple of scripts, and that the second was partially damaged by an unfortunate choice of director. And I’ll accept that Gatiss wrote this episode early on, before he had a character for either of the leads — which is one of the larger problems. I am a little unsettled, though. I wonder how much control Moffat really has over the show. Maybe he’s not a big-decisions guy. We’ll see how the next few episodes present themselves.

The next two episodes are directed by the guy from “The Eleventh Hour” — which, if nothing else, was directed with skill and a bit of bravado. Aside from young Amelia, I’d say the direction was the highlight that week. So for the near future I remain optimistic. Mostly.

The Pier

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Jake hadn’t been to the pier in ages. It still smelled of fish and of rot. Maybe the wood was a little more decayed than it had been. Jake was always so aware of the wood. It was comforting, in the abstract — the fact of it. It had once been alive, and that energy remained, seeped out of it into his being. Yet as it aged, that life continued to ebb. And it had not aged with dignity. The neglect poured through the cracks and splinters and the squishy bits of pylon, filled with bacteria Jake could hardly stand to imagine. It was such a balance for Jake — the uncleanliness of the place, the sense of death, which on a bad day sat with him like a bad roommate. It was that or the softness, the nature of the place, reassuring him that he was still alive, that the world remained in some small corners real, for all the manufacture imposed upon it. Stop paying attention, and eventually everything returns to its intended state. There’s only so long we can impose our control on the world, on any one thing. For all our vanity, our attempt at codification, nothing can be permanent. It’s that struggle against the inevitable — that’s where we get all our stress. It’s the same stress you get from carrying a lie with you, never knowing when you’ll have to compound it, expand your effort just to maintain your stasis, your artificial construct.

The truth tends to be disgusting on one level or another. On the days when Jake could stand the smell of it, or when the stifling lie of modernity clogged his head — that’s when he came here.

Jake blinked at the screen on his Blackberry, finally processing the text of the email he was reading. How long had he been staring at it? How had the phone climbed out of his pocket and into his hand? Jake tensed his arm as if to pitch the phone off the pier, skip it across the surface of the bay. A shudder flowed across his chest, and with some method Jake slipped the phone into his shoulder bag, zipping the compartment lest the phone claw its way out again.

Winding down

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So I have mulched a bit on “The Beast Below”. On first viewing I was just perplexed with it. I didn’t think I liked it much, despite many neat elements. Second viewing, the problems were still there but they didn’t bother me so much and I was better able to appreciate the good stuff.

The episode doesn’t hang together very well; it’s got all of these elements that it doesn’t bother to stitch together, or even use properly. So the Smilers… I sort of get why they’re there, even if they never do much, but what are the Winders for? I get that they’re basically the Queen’s secret service, but… what do they wind? The Smilers? What purpose do they serve in the story, besides a bit of exposition toward the end? What purpose does it serve to reveal that they’re also Smilers, when we don’t have much of a clue about either of them?

And that’s just to start with.

I also wasn’t convinced by the tragedy and shame of the society built on the whale. I mean, yeah. It’s unfortunate. But really? Why does this fact freak people out so much? And the whole reason the whale is there in the first place is because he can’t stand to hear children cry? Okay. And then there’s the tenuous comparison with the Doctor, that the script drives home over and over again.

Davies’ episodes were often sentimental, and sometimes that went too far, but it always felt honest. I’m not sure that Moffat really has the knack for this stuff.

The ideas and images, though — yeah. Some really good stuff in here. The political and social allegory, I’m not really in a place to weed out on my own. I’ve read some eloquent breakdowns of that aspect, and it seems that the episode is ripe with meaning. That’s nice. I don’t know if it’s as interesting as people make out, but I’ll process it eventually.

It doesn’t help the weird pacing and structure and lack of cohesion, but maybe I’ll grow to appreciate the other levels more as time goes on. Problems with structure and execution — sure; so long as they’re honest mistakes, who cares.

I think it’s the false emotion that blindsided me the first time through, and I think that’s what I’m still working to get past. Moffat is fine with his intellectual puzzles — more than fine. Yet when he tries to ground any of his games on a human level, he almost offends me.

We’ll see where he goes with this over the next eleven episodes.

Who 5.02 – The Beast Below

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Well, good grief. What was that?

I feel like I’m missing something important. Or several important things. Matt Smith continues to be excellent, and is on a progressive trend in that regard. Karen Gillan is… fine. As for the story, though… what?

I just don’t understand how the elements go together, or why. The Smilers are a neat piece of design, but why are they there? The whole premise of the episode seems… It feels a bit forced. And there’s not much to it beyond the analogies the script insists on whacking around like a mallet toward the end.

During the mid-’80s, when the show was almost canceled the first time, there was supposed to be a story about a star whale. Maybe it had been delayed from the late Tom Baker era. My chronology isn’t what it once was. Steven Moffat would have known this, and this episode is probably a reference to that unmade Colin Baker serial. And I guess that’s… nice. In an irrelevant way. It’s like the Macra. Before this episode aired, I was thinking it looked a bit like “Gridlock”, maybe crossed with a Cartmel-era political allegory. And in that sense, I guess I was right.

I’m rambling. I’m perplexed. That episode… it feels like it hid how little it had to say under a confusing structure and sense of pace. Alternatively, it feels like a much longer script that was cut down to forty-five minutes and no longer makes any sense.

Vapid, fast-forward, obvious, complicated, cloying, disjointed.

I’m going to have to watch it again later, and see what I can take from it. Right now… that is one of my least favorite episodes since the show has returned. I do appreciate the way the end trails into the following story, much as with the 1960s serials.

The superficiality at play here — it reminds me a bit of Neil Gaiman. Which is appropriate enough. Maybe I’m just not seeing something, but from my impression of other Moffat scripts, I doubt it.

See, back when Davies was in charge I liked Moffat’s episodes about as well as Davies’. The difference was, I felt that Moffat put everything interesting on the surface. There wasn’t really much to get out of a second or third viewing, beyond appreciating the same cleverness over again. With Davies, even his worst episodes, every time I watch them I feel I’m watching a new script. I see levels I had missed before, and make now connections. There are all of these buried, subconscious themes in his writing, that allow his scripts to work even when they don’t actually work at all.

Say, “Last of the Time Lords” — a lousy episode. Yet when you consider the thematic interplay it’s depicting, with the Doctor representing hope and the Master representing despair, each one struggling all these years to bring the other to his own level, and to make him see the world through the other’s eyes, suddenly the bizarre plot falls to the side and you can see the broad strokes of the character interaction and the story machinations. Then when you think about the threads woven through the season about the power of faith, the strength that even misguided hope brings to people, and the innate power of words — yeah, there’s a bit more meaning. The episode makes a little more sense still. And then if you imagine the whole story as a fairy tale, perhaps with a narrated introduction, rather than thinking of it as a literal depiction of events, it almost becomes a demented kind of genius. Almost.

The shriveled Doctor is still nonsense, of course. And it doesn’t forgive establishing the Archangel network as a purely psychological phenomenon — hypnosis — then suddenly building on it as a psychic one. But if you ignore the details and the plot, you can see how the story fits together as a machine. And on a few levels, it does actually work.

Even Moffat’s best episodes, I’ve never gotten anything like that. And this is not one of Moffat’s best episodes. At least… I don’t think it is. I’m terribly confused. Maybe I’ll have more to say later.

I can’t believe I’m more looking forward to a Mark Gatiss episode than the next two Moffat ones.

Oh, The Eleventh Hour? It had its nonsense. Several scenes went on too long, the story was a bad caricature of Davies-style handwave (minus the glee), and the pre-titles sequence was unnecessary. Yet tonally, it was just great. And though it’s a bit trite to say now, I rather wish the Doctor had taken little Amelia with him instead of Amy. What a lovely little actress. She’s probably the best thing out of the last two episodes.

Well. We’ll see where this goes.

Mobility (Tangent)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The last few days I’ve been playing through old Castlevania games – first Harmony of Dissonance, then Simon’s Quest, then Castlevania. Now I’m working on Aria of Sorrow.

The structure to Simon’s Quest – I’d never noticed before, as the game is so obtuse in directing the player around; if you know what you’re doing, the game has some genius level design, both within the mansions and in the overworld. The game is always directing you where you need to go next, and unless you’re a dunderhead and fight the obvious clues the game goes by very quickly, and rather elegantly. The only catch is in how well the game obscures some of its “keys” – the crystals and Dracula’s Heart, in particular.

The elegance here shows up Dracula’s Curse all the more. I should really finish cursing that game out. So to speak. I wonder if anyone would be interested in publishing my manifesto.