The Moment

  • Reading time:2 mins read

For those still confused about how to resolve The Day of the Doctor with The End of Time, it’s actually all pretty clean and tidy.

The Time War is sealed away so (in principle) it can’t be undone; we’ve now seen two different stories set in part on the exact same day; the final day of that war. The two stories give different perspectives on some of the same events.

Notably, both stories involve characters — Rassilon and the Moment — puncturing the Time Lock to try to avert Gallifrey’s destruction.

Rassilon did it the dumb way. He tried to pull Gallifrey out of the Lock, to continue the war. Shortly after, the Moment pulled the Doctors in, to end it.

In The End of Time they state that the Doctor has just taken hold of the Moment, and intends to use it. Ergo, the events of The End of Time occur in direct response to John Hurt’s actions at the start of The Day of the Doctor and take place while he is walking across Tattooine with Rose Tyler slung over his shoulder.

Of course Rassilon’s plan is crazy, dumb, and a failure — so in The Day of the Doctor a minor character later dismisses those events in a throw-away line. Rassilon’s failed plan is a minor thing that happened on that day, off-screen, involving power-mad characters who don’t factor into reality.

Then the Doctors all swoop in to save the day, sort of. Meanwhile, one presumes, Rassilon and the Master are still busy hopping all over the High Council chambers, shooting lightning bolts at each other.

Shutting Up

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Further on what I say below, whereas Davies’ version of Who was all about people asking the right questions, never mind the answers — the answers don’t matter — Moffat’s Who is all about these supposedly grand truths, facts, that the scripts dangle just outside the viewer’s grasp. It’s all about the answers; the answers are all that matters, and we won’t tell you what they are.

And also… and maybe this is just me, but I’m astonished with just how often (it’s very often) characters in Moffat’s Who tell each other to “shut up”. It seriously seems like at least once per episode.

I grew up in a household where everyone kept telling everyone else to shut up, and it was not a healthy place to be in. No one talked to anyone, or was interested in what anyone else had to say. Since I’ve gotten older and gotten around a little more, I get taken aback when I hear people say this. It’s just so incredibly rude, and arrogant.

The production and structure of Moffat’s show may follow very closely from Davies’, but its ethos is almost the opposite. It’s not about curiosity and reason; it’s about being quiet while someone else tells you what to think. And I don’t like it.

The Zombies of Nostalgia

  • Reading time:5 mins read

One of the things I find inane about British Doctor Who fandom is that even those too young to remember the original show tend to get caught up in its nostalgia value more than its actual content and message. It’s like they don’t like the show for what it is and does, but for the other associations that it brings to mind — of childhood, of times long past.

For all of my moping about the 1980s, and attempts to reconcile new things with my experiences of childhood, I don’t… really consider that kind of a mentality very constructive. In this case I also think it gets in the way of appreciating what the show really is about — which is a shame, as the show’s message is both unusual to mainstream TV and, I think, one of the most constructive messages around.

Here’s something I wrote a few months ago on a Web forum that I keep telling myself to avoid, as it eats up too much time and doesn’t give me back much in return — except maybe the opportunity to think about things that aren’t doing me much good to think about right now. The question was, what is it about this show that appeals so strongly to people, to allow it to last for so long? Most of the responses were about nostalgia, which irritated me enough to respond in my own grouchy way.

Yeah, I, uh… Coming from a US perspective, where it’s always been seen as something for college students and usually shown late at night, into the early morning, I wouldn’t say that these are fundamental or intrinsic parts of its appeal. I didn’t really get into the show until I was in my twenties, and that was because of the intellectual anarchy of the thing.

At its most basic level the show is about curiosity and taking the initiative to understand things beyond their surface appearance. I mean, it’s about a guy who looks human but isn’t, who explores all of time and space in a ship that looks like a police phone booth but isn’t. Even the most basic surface details, like that man’s face, are always in flux. For all of the small revelations over the years, the show’s backstory is still basically a big question mark. The show’s whole message is that what matters isn’t the facts, isn’t the answers. It’s the reasoning and the questioning. It’s about the way you approach things, not what you find.

Troughton pretends to be a bumbling fool, to cause people to underestimate him — taking advantage of others’ inability to see beyond that surface.

Pertwee takes the time to understand the Silurians rather than just assuming that they are monsters.

The Autons are terrifying because of how they subvert appearances, and the questions that they raise about what we take for granted.

In “The End of the World” Eccleston dismisses assumptions about posterity, anxieties about mundane problems, even the importance of our Earth in its own right. Really, the greatest surviving memory of human culture is Soft Cell? Oh well, people did good things. They made new opportunities for others to do good things. They moved on. Everything dies, and nothing really matters all that much. The only constant is change; adaptation. The willingness to see things differently, do things differently, try new things. That’s all there is in the end.

So, I would say that it’s the show’s attitude that stands out — at whatever point in one’s life that one might encounter it. And likewise to me, it’s those eras and those stories that best embody that attitude that most hit home.

And of course all of that passed without comment, while everyone afterward kept going on about nostalgia, and quoting earlier posts that reinforced what they were saying. So… here, just because I like feeling validated sometimes, I’ll quote something of my own.

This AV Club review of “Rose” serves well, I think, to explain why I broadly like the Davies era so much, and find that its spirit better typifies the show’s original ethos better than most of the eras in between (and since).

The emphasis then isn’t on the Doctor providing answers, but rather on Rose asking the right questions and being willing to listen to the answers. As the Doctor himself notes, Rose doesn’t believe him when he says the plastic men are trying to invade Earth and conquer humanity, but she’s still listening. She wants more from her life, which is why she ultimately accepts the Doctor’s offer, but she also just wants to understand the impossible things that are going on around her. And it isn’t just her interactions with the Doctor that are important. Her trip to Clive’s shed is also useful in reminding the audience how insane the entire concept of Doctor Who truly is. Even though Clive is basically right—he misses out on the time travel aspect, but since the Doctor is effectively immortal, it’s hard to not give him passing marks—and Rose is wrong when she dismisses him as a nutter, the key there is that she is wrong for the right reasons; Rose isn’t going to abandon all logic and reason without some fairly compelling evidence. And that fact makes the moment Rose finally steps inside the TARDIS all the more magical.

If you haven’t seen the AV Club’s Who coverage, it’s pretty darned good in general! In particular I think the reviews of (the recently miraculously recovered) Enemy of the World and Web of Fear are pretty much on-target. They’re more forgiving than I tend to be, but then I’m a cranky one.

While I’m Still Here

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Since 2005 Nine Inch Nails has been a discussion between two characters: the man who Trent Reznor feels he is deep inside, or who he once was, or very much wants to be; and the man who he became in the 1990s. For the sake of discussion, let’s call them True Trent and Demon Trent.

His work of the last decade is a patchwork of self-rediscovery. Gone are the meticulous soundscapes and concept albums (Year Zero aside), and with them departs the familiar “Trent Reznor” character, the protagonist of self-destructive operas like The Downward Spiral and The Fragile. In their place we have a mix of baffled confessional and therapy, and outward-looking projects like Year Zero and Ghosts.

Though the latter are interesting, it’s in the former that the core Nine Inch Nails narrative — by which I mean Reznor’s endless introspection — continues. To that end, let’s narrow our focus to With Teeth and The Slip.

On these albums, generally True Trent assumes the role of narrator. In songs like “Every Day Is Exactly The Same” and “Echoplex” he deals with the boredom and creeping emptiness of a sober life. While he spent a decade in a bottle, his world had moved on and left him behind. Come 2005 he was out of the darkness, older on the outside. Inside, though, where there should have been years of growth and wisdom and personal experiences, there was just a fuzzy emotional void — the space where his demon had sat, and the open portal through which it could, at any time, return.

Notice here the use of pronouns. If in these songs there is a “you”, chances are that it refers to Demon Trent. At times the switch flips, and Demon Trent takes charge of “I”, with True Trent demoted to “you”. Depending on the song this interplay can be playful, or earnest, or frustrated, or defeated. The discussion is possibly at is most obvious in “Only”, itself a dry parody, or 2005 revamp, of “Down In It”:

I just made you up to hurt myself, yeah
And I just made you up to hurt myself
And it worked.
Yes it did!

There is no you
There is only me
There is no you
There is only me
There is no fucking you
There is only me
There is no fucking you
There is only me

It is in this context that Hesitation Marks operates as an album. Take the character from The Downward Spiral and The Fragile (with his accordingly lavish soundscape), and filter him through the themes of With Teeth, and you have the basic story.

The album began as a pair of tracks — the initially-baffling “Everything”, and the hip-hop influenced “Satellite” — for a long-delayed “best of” record; according to Reznor, everything else grew out of that material. If you consider the basic discussion of modern-day Nine Inch Nails, that totally makes sense.

“Everything” is a cry of incautious, (as Reznor put it) arrogant victory. “I survived everything”, he sings in the verse. “Wave goodbye / wish me well / I’ve become something else”. But then the strange, dissonant chorus hits — and under all the noise we get a different story. “But this thing that lives inside of me / will surely rise and wake”.

This is the nature of addiction, especially over as long a period as Reznor suffered; it never leaves you, and in its absence one needs an exhausting, constant vigilance. Let down your guard for a moment, and you relapse, and you’re back where you started.

Indeed, after that show of arrogance, in the very next track Reznor switches characters:

satellite
I’m watching you
I’m one step ahead
satellite
I’m part of you
I’m inside your head

This interplay forms the basic story of the album. Years later, the man from those earlier albums returns. He makes an earnest effort to shed his demons and reclaim ownership over himself. For a while he seems to make progress. Yet what he fails to understand is that his demons will never, ever go away. He will never win, not entirely. If he chooses to fight, then the fight will be forever.

I’ve got to let it go
I’ve got to get straight
why’d you have to make it so hard
let me get away

One of the intriguing and frustrating elements is that it can be very difficult to tell who is speaking any given line. Some songs seem to be a call and response between the two Trents, while others are entirely one or the other. As part of this structure there is actually a little sympathy for Demon Trent. He’s just doing what he does, and doesn’t totally understand why True Trent is rejecting him.

There are some ups and downs. “All Time Low” seems to be about Demon Trent’s attempts to seduce Real Trent. “In Two” is about a drastic measure that Real Trent takes to cleanse himself. In the end it is unclear quite what happens. It appears that our man’s energy runs out, and he is unable to maintain the fight — though which man can we assume is speaking?

Only thing I’ve ever done
Closest I have ever come
Oh so tired on my own
Best days I have ever known

Apparently as he sings “the world” ends… and as it burns he continues to hang on, watching, reflecting.

well I don’t mind
I’m ok
wish it didn’t have to end this way

As the world roars and fades into oblivion, we hear someone honking playfully on a baritone sax. If the voice we’re listening to is True Trent, the sense that we get is, well, at least he tried. If this is goodbye, then it is a gentle one. He understands the situation and what he’s up against, and for all of his regrets he has accepted defeat. At least, for now.

Copy Of A

  • Reading time:5 mins read

On first impression I really, really like Hesitation Marks. It’s about as sophisticated an album as Reznor has put out — musically, lyrically, structurally, thematically. He is maturing, yet this isn’t old man music. Whereas the new Van Halen album basically sounds like the band trying to recapture its old sound and vitality (using songs written some 35 years ago), this is the sound of a man with a history coming to terms with the present.

This is not an album that I could have known I wanted to hear. Whereas the singles felt stuck in a groove, on the full album the only hint of complacency comes in those nods to NIN’s past.

The lead single, “Came Back Haunted”, is the safest — possibly on purpose. Production aside, Thom Moyles compared the song to “The Perfect Drug” — one of Reznor’s glossiest and most disposable tracks, and also possibly the most raw example of his songwriting template. Similarly, “Came Back Haunted” is as generic a NIN anthem as I can imagine. It seems to deliver a precise focus tested example of an exciting new Nine Inch Nails song.

Of course there is probably more here than there seems. The title carries layers of meaning, from the public return of Nine Inch Nails to the broader theme of revisitation in a new context. To that end the ending vamp, its guitar motif distorted and borrowed from The Downward Spiral (thanks again to Mr. Moyles), is the album’s clearest reference to history (and perhaps old narrative threads).

Each in its own way, the singles all sound like they are trying to sound like Nine Inch Nails. “Haunted” is a lesser echo of the past. “Copy of A” sounds like exactly what I would expect from NIN in 2013. “Everything” is conspicuously anti-NIN. The whole reason it seems to exist is to play against expectation, which in turn leaves an echo of its opposite.

None of these songs is at all poor, and I quite liked the variety from one song to the next. On the basis of the singles I expected something familiar yet colorful. Yet by the same logic, on some level they all… kind of bored me.

To my relief, the rest of the album is a new thing — and a thing that really excites me. It has such energy and tension.

I keep liking different things. Tracks that swept under my radar suddenly become the best thing on the album. At some point over the last two days, each song has become one of my favorite ever NIN tracks.

More than the songs, the whole production feels… big. Momentous. Important. Here I am, I think. I’m listening to this when it’s new, before everyone in the world has analyzed it to death, before it becomes a landmark album. This is still the confusion phase, where people will wonder what this… is, and why Reznor chose to call it a Nine Inch Nails album. I find myself wondering what it was like to hear Pet Sounds in May 1966. It must have been more dramatic, but I imagine it was kind of like this.

Right now, I just think this is such an amazing album. With hindsight it all feels so obvious. Of course this is what he would release in 2013, and of course this is how you move forward as a person and an artist, while lugging 25 years of musical baggage. Somehow as Reznor gets older he only seems to get more vital and current — and his music only ever gets more truthful.

I’m not sure what my reaction says for longevity, as most things that stick with me take a while to dig under my skin. It could be that I’m just bowled over by the newness, and by my flaunted expectations. If nothing else, this album is full of great, fresh material.

Some observations:

The majority of the tracks are over five minutes long. Generally at around the three or four minute mark each seems to reach its natural conclusion. Then it… well, comes back haunted. HEY, it says. I’M STILL HERE. LET’S GO AROUND A FEW MORE TIMES. Around here I notice that I start to tune out. The next thing I know, I’m in the middle of a new song and I feel like I’ve missed something. I go back and I think, hey, this song is great too! Then the cycle repeats itself.

I don’t know if I’m just listening wrong. My life is busy these days, and it’s hard to give music my full attention. I need to focus to really wrap my head around the structure.

Also… man, if I didn’t know Reznor liked Bowie… I’d know it.

In recent interview Reznor keeps mentioning David Byrne; how Remain in Light changed his idea of what recorded music could be, and how he was modeling his new tour after Stop Making Sense. I hear it in here. This whole thing does have the energy and flow of that movie. In particular, “Running” could hardly be more Talking Heads.

Here’s a… thing. Try putting “While I’m Still Here” on a loop. See how that goes. Intentional? Who knows.

Eater of Dreams — is this meant to sound like medical support equipment? Or, perhaps, a satellite?

“All Time Low” is more like an all-time high. “Running” is also amazing, on a more subtle level.

That saxophone section to “While I’m Still Here” — did Reznor play that himself? I seem to remember he used to be a sax player.

Also, the remixes are splendid in a way we haven’t seen since… well, The Perfect Drug EP. But really, Further Down The Spiral.

An old way to vent a muse

  • Reading time:6 mins read

(Reposted from Twitter, to clear up my feed a bit.)

The Fragile, love it as I do, was Reznor trying too hard. With Teeth is the response to that. There he deliberately lets go and runs with it. It’s exactly the opposite album. Interesting thing is, those are my two favorite of his albums. One despite its flaws, the other because of.

“The Day The World Went Away”… why is this on here? Why is it the lead single? Same for “Starfuckers, Inc.”. Disc 1 is full of nonsense. But then you get brilliance like “The Great Below”, “The Wretched”, and most of the instrumentals. Some of the best stuff he’s ever done.

It’s interesting that once Reznor chose not to kill himself trying he managed four albums in three years. As opposed to fifteen years. Granted I’m not hot on most of Year Zero and I still think The Slip is a collection of scraps. And the style is very samey over this period.

I kind of lump it all together as one era, with its ups and downs. Of that era, With Teeth is the lead attraction. The rest is extra. Doesn’t hurt that impression that the latter two albums each cost five bucks, and just appeared like magic within months of each other. And the second album was deliberately leaked in full (though in a different version) as part of its promotional ARG thing. So again, extra. The thing is, all of that stuff — it sounds like he had fun doing it. So even where it doesn’t do much for me, it’s hard to begrudge.

The only thing that gets me is this weird consensus that arose that The Slip is one of the best things he ever recorded. Which… it’s not. When it came out, I took it as a blog post of an album: unexpected, cheap, immediate. A new kind of a thing. A new way to vent a muse. I figured he’d release one of these every so often, when he had something to say. I thought that was sort of interesting. But as an album?

There’s also this weird thing of totally missing the self-effacing humor and confession of the more interesting songs on there. Like, “Discipline”? It’s using old NIN language as an ironic framework to say, “Actually, I admit my head isn’t working right. So now what?” It’s the most obvious thing in the world. I don’t think I’ve seen this acknowledged. Every review is all, “YEAH HE’S ALL RAUNCHY AGAIN!”

So I don’t really know what’s going on with the way people respond to that album. Then, I seem to be out of touch with most things.

(In response to some concerns about the quality of the last ten years — Hesitation Marks included — and the suggestion that The Fragile’s glow had dimmed over the years:)

What interests me about the 2005-2008 era is its unprecedented sincerity and intimacy, and how that aligns with Reznor’s story. Reznor almost died on the Fragile tour. He was a wreck. His life hit bottom. So he cleaned up and took a step back to look at himself. The music became therapeutic and took on the tone of a diary — the diary of a screwed-up person who was really trying to get better. So you get songs like “Every Day is Exactly the Same” and “Echoplex”, about that raw, numb sober emptiness. And the satire of “Only”. In place of theatrical rage and self-loathing (which had grown affected) the music becomes sad, playful, lost, brave, and earnest.

Mind you, despite the affected bits, The Fragile is still tied for my favorite of his albums. There’s just so much good in there. And The Downward Spiral is kind of beyond discussion or measure, really. It’s just one of the most important albums ever recorded. It is what it is.

The last decade is the era where he starts to care about things outside himself. He gets active politically. He gets married and has kids. And you can hear that expansiveness in the music. You can hear this rush of air as he unseals the vault and tries to breathe again. So that biographical element — it’s impossible for me to ignore, and with it in mind the music takes on more meaning than it might.

As for Hesitation Marks… yeah, I can hear where he is mentally, already. It seems just as sincere, but with more lavish attention. So although I don’t know how the whole thing will turn out, it’s already exciting me as another chapter in The Trent Reznor Story. It’s like Game of Thrones or The Wire or something. Each album is only part of the tale, and the sum is more than the parts. So far I’m getting the best of early and later NIN, for my tastes — the self-awareness, plus the ambition. But we’ll see, I guess!

(In response to comments about the lavish engineering on TDS and The Fragile, and its absence on the 2000s material:)

That’s all totally true, and I agree with it. The engineering in his 1990s stuff boggles the mind. I still always find new things. I’ll throw Broken in there as a prototype, as well. I’ve never heard anything else like his 1990s material, in that respect. By contrast, With Teeth is almost like a new version of PHM: stripped down, bare, almost primitive. A totally different approach. He recorded it mostly by himself on a laptop, and you can tell. The thing is, to me that suits the raw, confessional tone of it.

Rather than trying to dazzle with production, he’s trying to be honest with himself and making a real effort at straight composition. The results are often clumsy and stark — they sound more like demos than tracks off of a finished album. But that works in context. Where it gets a little old is that his next three albums have the exact same approach.

It was nice to see him experiment conceptually. Hey, concept album about politics and the end of the world. All-instrumental opus. And I guess if he’d spent all of his time layering and getting things perfect he wouldn’t have moved on and explored so much. But that sound really didn’t bear lasting for more than one album. After four albums I miss the old studio wizardry that defined NIN.

With Hesitation Marks, I’m getting a sense that this element is somewhat making its return. Layers, variety, confession, composition. I don’t know if I’m just projecting and hearing what I want to hear, and making of it what I want to make, but it feels… matured. Like the culmination of the things that he’s been doing well over the years — while still experimenting with bold, wacky nonsense.

The Making and Unmaking of a Game-Maker Maker

  • Reading time:2 mins read

The decade between 1995 and 2005 was a dark time for the bedroom developer. With the introduction of the Web and the death of dial-up boards, the Shareware scene had crashed. With the introduction of 3D cards and the growing popularity of the home PC, development became complex and expensive. There was never a harder time for an amateur game designer to get started and build an audience.

That silent decade need not have happened. In 1991, a company called Recreational Software Designs released its own game design suite for MS-DOS. RSD’s Game-Maker supported VGA graphics, four-way scrolling, Sound Blaster music and effects, full-screen animations, large maps, and fully animated characters and monsters. Its editing tools were powerful and intuitive, allowing quick turnaround of sprites and background tiles and easy assembly into full games.

RSD ceased development just before the Web caught on, and right on the verge of a radical reinvention. The company never built an online presence, and Game-Maker failed to make much of an impression on the Web – leaving a big void for Mark Overmars to fill.

We caught up with lead programmer G. Andrew Stone, to talk about Game-Maker and the place that it holds in indie game history.

( Read the original post at Gamasutra )

Wrapping it Up

  • Reading time:5 mins read

While we’re all talking about Doctor Who and various contrived plot threads, has anyone noticed the shift in last few years in the construction, content, and emphasis of the show’s finales?

Here’s Davies’ string of finales:

1) Daleks return… and they’re crazy! Also, the Doctor dies.
2) It’s Cybermen versus Daleks! Also, Rose leaves forever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3) Holy Hell, it’s the Master! And he’s crazy! Also, the Doctor chased another one away.
4) It’s Davros! And wow, is his plan ever crazy! Also, is the Doctor dying? Also, aw, poor Donna.
5) It’s the Time Lords! And they’re crazy! Also, the Doctor dies.

Here are Moffat’s finales:
1) Stonehenge turns out to be a trap created by a bunch of the Doctor’s previously established enemies who think the Doctor will destroy the universe, but in closing the trap they actually allow the TARDIS to explode, thereby destroying the universe — except somehow the Doctor previously created a predestination paradox, allowing him to rewrite the universe without himself in it, until at her wedding Amy somehow remembers him on a conscious level, which makes everything okay. Also, Rory survived non-existence in the form of an Auton by Amy remembering him on some subconscious level — and when the Doctor rebooted the universe he was alive again for real. And when Amy remembered the Doctor, that somehow caused Rory to remember being an Auton, even though he never had been. Meanwhile, what caused the TARDIS to explode? Who planned all of this? Moffat will explain later.

2) Amy and Rory’s daughter, having been groomed from a very young age to assassinate the Doctor, was therefore essential to a totally different scheme from the one in the previous series finale, even though she had long since decided not to involve herself. So a bunch of obsessed people put her in a space suit that moved on its own, to force her to kill the Doctor in a specific place at a specific time. Except she figured out to stop that from happening, which interfered with a predestination paradox, which in turn caused time to end… until the Doctor contrived a wedding ceremony where he revealed that he was wearing a previously established shape-changing miniaturized space ship and then convinced River to kiss the space ship — which put time on its normal course again. Also: DOCTOR WHO? DOCTOR WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO?

3) Who is Clara Oswald REALLY? Also: DOCTOR WHOOOOOO? DOCTOR WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO?

What I’m seeing is that Moffat has moved the focus. Where before the draw came from spectacle and recognition factor, now the show sells its finales on their plot content alone. And those plots… well. They’re a little convoluted, they tend not to actually resolve their key questions, and they tend to reuse their ideas.

Obviously Davies found his formula as well, but in his case it was simple and generally effective: Here is something new, something big, something cool (that you probably wanted to see all along) — and it has big consequences!

The appeal of Moffat’s conclusions is predicated on caring about his plot machinations in their own right. How does the Doctor get out of his predetermined death? Who is Clara? Who is River Song? What is the First Question? These aren’t organic things that come out of the material; these are puzzles that he sets up, to build toward a big one-time shock of revelation. Then once that factoid is out of the way, things tend to continue more or less as they were. There are no long-term consequences. There’s not even a real resolution. There’s just a hint at further puzzles.

Of course Davies’ consequences can change whenever he feels like flipping the switch — but in the moment at least there is catharsis. There’s the catharsis of the big momentous events that shake up the characters’ worlds and expand the show’s format (Wow, a standoff between Daleks and Cybermen! How did this never happen before?!/I didn’t realize the TARDIS could do that, but of course it can!/Now that the Master’s back, what does that mean?!), and then the second catharsis of their fallout. The world changes, the show changes, and so does the new normal. Eccleston leaves, Piper leaves, Agyeman leaves, Tate leaves. It builds up, creating the sense of evolution, of passing time.

We’re over halfway through Smith’s third series. By this point it felt like Tennant had been around forever; had been on a long, long journey. Smith, I only feel like he has just made it through his first act.

Part of this can be attributed to the lack of cast turnover (as compared to the revolving door behind the scenes) in Moffat’s era. To me, part of it is that it just feels like the show has been stringing the audience along since 2010, biding time with riddles and parlor tricks rather than dealing with things as they come. The show has become less dynamic in every sense.

The Only Time

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I’ve gone over this before; the remastered Pretty Hate Machine is nice, if a little underwhelming after the special edition of The Downward Spiral. The lack of any special content aside from NIN’s cover of “Get Down Make Love” (previously available on the “Sin” single) is a little disappointing, but would be fine if the new mix were a clear improvement. The problem is that although its tracks are a little clearer than before, perhaps EQed a little better, the 2010 album comes from the twenty-first century school of mastering — which is to say, “louder is better“. Everything is compressed to the upper registers, so we lose all of the old dynamic range and the vocal tracks are now often overwhelmed by the backing.

This is unfortunate, and you’d think that Trent Reznor would know better, but it’s sort of a fact of modern studio engineering. Whatever. What I’m noticing, which I have noticed before but I’m noticing again now, is the peculiar effect of this new mastering — which is to say, the better tracks get noisy and hard to listen to, but the weaker tracks — some of them runners up for Trent Reznor’s worst ever — come out much improved. And the damnedest thing is that it’s hard for me to narrow down why.

“The Only Time” should by all reasonable extremes be the worst song on the album — except its misjudged weirdness elevates it beyond “That’s What I Get”. Now? I… kind of like it. It’s certainly easier on the ears than most of the album, and now its weirdness has a certain charm that it lacked. Again, I don’t know what’s different aside from the compressed dynamic range. It’s hard to do an A/B comparison. It’s still a stupid song, but it has become enjoyably dumb.

“That’s What I Get” will forever be Reznor’s most pointless album track, but again it lives a little more than before — as does “Ringfinger”, which to my ear will always be a limp reworking of his perhaps too-saucy-for-1989 “Twist”.

I have always thought that the mixes on Pretty Hate Machine were the most anemic of all known versions of those songs. The single mix of “Sin” is so much richer, so much better in every way — as are most of the early mixes of “Down In It”, “Sanctified”, and the joyously vague “Kinda I Want To”, which in a discussion with our Amandeep Jutla I once paraphrased as “I want to do something transgressive! And I feel ambivalent about that!” In order to make all of this material sit together and sound sufficiently gloomy, someone knocked off most of the individual edges.

This may in part explain why I’m not too bothered by the new master. The songs that it degrades mostly sound better elsewhere, and the songs that it improves have never sounded so good.

Also, the packaging.

Time and Distance

  • Reading time:5 mins read

With the recent shots of the rebuilt Hartnell-era sets for Mark Gatiss’ upcoming 50th anniversary biopic, the more conservative edges of Who fandom are bouncing off the (plywood and fiberglass) walls, demanding to know why the show’s current incarnation has changed anything at all. The way that the show was 50 years ago should be the way that it is now — never mind that the whole point of the show is change, and that it would never have survived this long without it.

A recent discussion turned to the final moments of Skyfall, which — not to spoil anything for the holdouts — bring the awesome return of a very, very familiar location from the early years of the series. When it becomes clear what’s happening, it feels like an epiphany. A chill goes up the spine. All of that jazz. Someone held out that moment as proof that they should never have changed anything about Doctor Who, because look at how right it all felt when they put things back the way they were supposed to be! Another faction came in to pooh-pooh overt calls to nostalgia, saying that anything alive needed to keep moving forward.

Which is, of course, true — but there’s a little more than nostalgia in Skyfall. All of the Daniel Craig Bond movies use the reboot in Casino Royale to make a point of building and exploring the myth of the character and the franchise. To those in the know the office isn’t just a point of nostalgia; it’s a mythic touchstone that seems to suggest deeper meaning by drawing on what we already know. When you see it, the intended reaction seems to be something along the lines of “Oh, so this is how we got there!” It draws from the past to build on it and make it feel significant in a new and vibrant way.

Generally I think the new series has done a pretty good job of following that path — particularly under Davies’ eye. When Moffat tries to inject meaning, it’s kind of… labored and metatextual (i.e. “Doctor WHOOOOOOO”; “The Doctor and the monsters; you can’t have one without the other!” and all). Compare that to the offhanded way that Davies harks back to The Edge of Destruction and (possibly) the McGann film in Eccleston’s last few episodes, or establishes any number of iconic elements from the classic series (Daleks, Time Lords, Sarah Jane, the Master) as ancient lore that carry a weight of significance as they trickle into the present.

Time and distance give the space for reflection; the images and concepts that persist form the basis of legend. For a new chapter to seize on those images and concepts and, without undue deference, to explore their place in the myth — that makes the whole thing seem coherent, it lends an apparent weight to the immediate events, and it lends a hint of consequence to previous instances of those images and concepts — as well as their immediate circumstances.

So. It’s a little more complicated, I think. It’s not that the office in Skyfall is how it should be; it’s that now it’s how it always was in the old days, and that this fact now carries a little more apparent meaning than it did — or than it would have, had things remained that way over the last several movies. Likewise it’s not a matter of nostalgia. Nostalgia is zombie thinking; the living death of the past, casting a pall on all that still thrives. These elements aren’t about stasis; they’re about a sense of consequence. Not what things are, but why they are that way — or at least how they came to be.

This is, to my mind, a really enthralling way to go about storytelling within an ancient and well-defined framework. Over the last decade reams of pop culture “reboots” and new adaptations have heavily pulled on this structure — Bond, Battlestar Galactica, Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Nolan’s Batman series. Even Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland sequel (confusingly titled “Alice in Wonderland”) has a bunch to say about personal change, the differences in Victorian expectations of women versus young children, and the nature of Wonderland as an extended metaphor for Alice’s psyche, that lends new perspective to the original material.

Of all of these, I think that Davies’ Who is one of the bigger accomplishments. It draws heavily from and extrapolates from the classic series, attempting to lay extra layers of meaning onto what came before — yet it tends to avoid overt reverence. The result is both vital, in the sense that it is alive and does what it needs to do by the pragmatic demands of the present, and consequential in that the present and all that occurs within it occurs within eyesight of the looming weight, promise, and threat of the past.

This is of course just my interpretation.

Kenji Eno

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Man. This is making me feel a little weird.

If you’re reading this blog, you know how I am with videogames; this deep-seated ambivalence. I love what they can be, but I tend to hate what they are. There’s a small handful of designers out there who I think have the right ideas or the right attitude, that could actually make something of this form if people just listened to what they said.

One of the top tier is Kenji Eno. He retired in a huff about 13 years ago. Since then I doubt a month has gone by when I haven’t wondered if he’s going to ever design another game. Every few years he has threatened to, and he very nearly did something for the Wii. (EDIT: Looks like he actually followed through, on a smaller scale.) His final game, D2, is sometimes my favorite game for the Dreamcast, which is in turn my favorite game system and the last bastion of progressive design in the mainstream industry.

The man was avant-garde in an era when videogames never ever were. He couldn’t follow a straight formula if his life depended on it. He’d get bored and depressed at the suggestion, and then go make a sound-only game for blind people, or… something like this:

1UP: What can you tell us about Short Warp, the wild minigame collection you made for 3DO?

KE: This was the funkiest game!

1UP: And it even came packaged with a free condom. Were you trying to get gamers to have more sex? Because when we see used copies in stores, the condom is always unused and unopened.

KE: That’s sad. [Laughs] This game was made when I was almost on the edge. My mental status was getting very unbalanced, so I wanted to balance myself back by creating a game like this. I was thinking, “If I’m going to create a game like this, I should do something really crazy.” And that’s how I came up with the idea of this game, and that’s why I included a condom. However, I had to make it limited because the packaging was expensive because it came packed with a condom, so the physical dimensions of the package got thicker, and there weren’t any packages like that. So the manufacturing fee jumped up, and condoms weren’t cheap either, so it was expensive to manufacture the games. If I manufactured too many units, I was going to be deep in the red. So that’s why I limited the units.

1UP: How many units did you make?

KE: 10,000, and I hand-numbered all of the packages myself.

The man was an auteur and a rock star, and the game industry didn’t know what to do with him. After a certain point he got fed up with the scene and returned to his first calling, music.

He was only 42 when he died. Which means he was 29 when he retired from game design. He was 20 when he got his start with the sound design to a Famicom prot of Altered Beast. He was 25 when he delivered his breakout game, D. His entire career spanned just a decade, from scutwork through superstardom to sidelining and burnout. In amongst there he met and influenced and was influenced by the likes of Goichi Suda and Fumito Ueda. And he also pissed people off — not without good reason, or fair warning.

I was very mad at Sony. When I released D on the PlayStation, Acclaim was to publish it. So the sales people gathered orders for a 100,000 units, but Sony had given their other titles manufacturing priority. So Sony told me that they had only manufactured 40,000 units, and I was very mad about that . . . . So I was talking to a guy at Sony, and this was toward the end of the year, and I said, “OK, I’m going to go to [Japanese electronics retailer] Bic Camera, and if I don’t see my game there, I’m going to punch you.” and they said, “No don’t worry about it. It’s going to be there.” And I went to Bic Camera and didn’t find it, so I actually did punch this guy — so that should tell you how mad I was.

And so now he’s dead. And an era is passed. Be that as it may, surely his effort must have had some effect. Fifteen years and a couple of abysmal console launches later, surely the field is changed somewhat?

Well. Look at that; a new PlayStation.

Here’s the short version.

Yoshida: What do you mean, people aren’t buying game consoles? People still buy consoles. All we have to do is bring people games that they want to play, and they will buy our console. That doesn’t mean original or exclusive games, and we certainly don’t need new voices or intend to publish anything too outside the norm — but I am confident that the games that happen to materialize on our system will make people want to own it.

So okay. He probably wouldn’t have made another game on the scale of what came before. And if he did, it would have made only a small impact — and far too late to turn this ship around. You can’t fight entropy. Not with a hundred Enos. It’s foolish, really. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, or hope.

It’s not his voice that I’ll miss; it’s the potential that he represented. It’s the fact that guys like Eno are out there in the world, and that just sometimes they have an effect — either directly or by proxy. And now there’s one fewer. And the world is poorer for it.

Thanks to Amandeep Jutla and Frank Cifaldi.

The Reign of Terror

  • Reading time:6 mins read

So the first season of classic Doctor Who is now complete on DVD — or as complete as it will get. The seven-part story Marco Polo is missing, and is represented on DVD by a half-hour cut-down photo reconstruction set to the surviving audio track. And then there is the case of the season finale, the six-part The Reign of Terror. As with Marco Polo it’s one of those early-era historicals, this time set during the French Revolution. For years the serial was missing, but in the 1980s four of its six parts were recovered from a film archive in Cyprus. Cypress should also have held copies of episodes four and five, but they were destroyed during a Turkish invasion in 1974. Such is the way of things.

As with the Patrick Troughton serial The Invasion, the serials two missing episodes have been animated for DVD release. New pictures are set to the existing audio, and bingo; we have a completed episode. Whereas The Invasion was animated by famed British studio Cosgrove Hall (responsible for Danger Mouse and Count Duckula, among other series), The Reign of Terror was primarily animated by a guy off of the Internet who calls himself Otaking.

The results are, shall we say, mixed. The discussion that I have seen has focused on the rapid cutting in episode four, which goes against the directorial style of the existing episodes (and indeed most 1960s TV). People have also singled out lots of weird touches like candles that cast shadows of themselves on the wall, or an odd cutaway to a character’s crotch as he rose from a chair. The animation definitely has its problems, but I wouldn’t consider any of that a major issue.

The biggest thing that stands out to me, to the extent that I find the animation hard to watch, is a drastic difference in character models from one shot to the next. In one scene it took me a while before I realized that two separate shots depicted the same character, as the geometry and shading looked so completely different. I just thought there was another unspecified character in the room.

The other problem, which ties into the above confusion, has to do with dialogue. Due to various decisions it often takes some concentration on my part to work out who is talking, and to whom. Although I understand the impulse to avoid as much lipsync as possible, as it is very time-consuming and tedious work, there seems to be little attention here to the flow of the script. Halfway through a sentence we will cut to a shot of the character standing up with his mouth closed. Sometimes a character barely opens his mouth before we switch to an extended reaction shot. This is particularly evident in conversations involving Hartnell; it seems whenever another character is talking all we see is close-ups of Hartnell’s face. A couple of times — and this is almost cute — the moment a character begins to talk, the top of another character’s head passes in front of his mouth.

To make it stranger all of this is contrasted with sudden jump cuts to an extreme blow-up of a character’s mouth. That… still doesn’t help me follow the discussion. It just makes me feel like I’m being jerked around.

The thing that confuses me about the character models is that there are only limited drawings for each character. Then the animators apply a morphing effect to the portraits to add lipsync and generally make them less static. I can understand the model shifting if we’re talking about hundreds, or even dozens, of frames of animation. Here it’s just a few individual drawings. Seriously? You can’t draw six pictures of William Hartnell with the same general facial geometry? And then once you have the pictures you can’t be bothered to animate a complete sentence?

As I say, I don’t so much care about the specific editorial choices. So the editing jumps around more than it should from a historical perspective; okay, whatever. So long as the cutting doesn’t interfere with my moment-to-moment comprehension, I’ll accept the stylization. The visuals are a new product, and you have to give them some creative leeway to do what the animator feels they need to do. What bothers me about the above two issues is the extent to which they interfere with my comprehension, and generally make the viewing experience more work than it should be.

When I watch The Invasion, I almost feel a twinge of disappointment when the animation ends. I’ve shown it to a couple of people, and they were enthralled with episode one — and then totally lost interest when it hit episode two and switched to a live-action archive TV show. The animation was that good, on its own merits. Here, I was relieved when the animation ended and I could relax my attention. I don’t think I would show this to someone who wasn’t already invested in the era, as I don’t think it reflects well on the series. It’s better than recons or the narrated episodes, in that I do feel that I can follow the story now — but I still have to work at it.

Maybe I could accept that better in the middle of a more interesting story. As it is, this is a simple and rather uneventful tale — so all the while that I’m focusing, I can’t help but wonder if it’s worth the effort. By no means is this a poor story, and I’ll take even a slightly dull Hartnell over great swaths of the show’s history. What rankles me is the juxtaposition. If Reign were to swap animation teams with The Invasion, I think I could handle things a little better; a story as still and simple as The Reign of Terror demands the clarity of a Cosgrove Hall, while a story as jumbled as The Invasion could withstand a little more shaking.

To my understanding the animation team here underwent several changes in procedure as the project went along, and to be sure the end of episode five is much steadier than the start of episode four — but the above problems persist to the end. Previously, on the basis of the Invasion animations, I was eager to see their work on the remaining missing episodes. Now I approach the prospect with more caution.

Air Fortress

  • Reading time:8 mins read

The Goodwill by my house is a well of pleasant surprises, from a $3.00 unopened, factory sealed copy of Torchwood: Children of Earth to a well-kept VHS copy of Dark Crystal. Yesterday on entering I noticed a glass cabinet by the register. The first thing that leapt at me was Spider-Man for the Sega Genesis. Decent game; I have the very similar Master System version. I don’t need it. Still, they had Genesis games! On closer inspection I also saw a stack of NES cartridges. The spines faced away, so I could only see the top game — some sort of top-down racer. The cashier was busy, so I waited.

On the way out I flagged down the lady and asked to flip through the games. The selection did not inspire me. there was a Wheel of Fortune game. There were two copies of another racing game. There were a couple of licensed games. And then at the very bottom, a well-worn rental copy of Air Fortress. That was it; though I had only played it in emulated snatches, I knew that I wanted to look deeper. The game was fairly obscure; it had a strange structure and mechanics; it was by eventual Nintendo second party Hal Labs. It’s just, when you’re flipping from one eccentric ROM to the next it’s hard to focus on any game for too long. Having the physical cartridge would give me an excuse to do so.

Air Fortress is a curious game, and obscure in more than one sense. Its director, designer, and programmer Hiroaki Suga didn’t seem to do much else. He ported the second Eggerland (or as we know it, Lolo) game from the MSX to the Famicom Disk System. (Later the first Lolo for the NES proper would compile the best levels from all of these earlier games into a single megamix for Western audiences.) He was in charge of New Ghostbusters II, and wrote music for a pinball game and a Game Boy version of Shanghai.

His game was released in severely limited quantities. The history of the NES being as opaque as it is, there are many conflicting version of the story — but according to one version Hal produced just 20 copies to sit alongside the NES test launch in 1985. In 1987 Hal pushed it out again for a larger official print run of 385 copies. As the story goes, people had to order the cartridge directly from Hal Labs — and in turn Hal would throw in a wall poster. Finally in 1989 the game entered regular production, and even was selected for a major Nintendo-sponsored game-playing competition — but its time was past and it never really gained traction or widespread recognition.

So check this out. The game is at least as old as Zelda and Metroid, and it feels like a postmodern indie retro game. It starts off with a Zelda-style story scroll that you’d swear was deliberately ripped off of that game but which was more likely parallel development. The character is named Hal Bailman because, well, Hal Labs and… Bailman? I don’t get that part. It’s a cool name, though.

The game has, for the time, an eccentric structure; it alternates between side-scrolling shooting segments and… well, not platformer areas. And it’s not quite action-adventure. Let’s just call it action-adventure platforming, though, to make the point and move on. During the shooter segments you bulk up on the game’s two kinds of power ups (of which we will speak more soon), then the adventure-platforming segments are where we see the real Hal-style contextual puzzle level design come into play.

The hesitation in that last paragraph comes from the game’s unusual mechanics; in the platformer sections Mr. Bailman has two main moves: shoot, and fly. He also can walk along the ground, slowly. The D-pad is used for all motion, and both buttons shoot. One shoots a standard projectile; the other shoots bombs. The effect of this control scheme is a little like the dual-stick, dual-trigger setup of modern first-person shooters — except minus a dimension.

There are two on-screen counters: one for energy, and one for bombs. These two counters correspond to the two power-ups. You can use the bombs at any time, and they can be replenished; they work sort of like the missiles in Metroid, except more so. Some things can only be destroyed with a bomb, and some things are better disposed of with one. Energy is an interesting thing, worthy of its own paragraph.

Energy serves two roles: not-dying, and fuel. Think of the way breath meters work in so many water levels, where a character’s life will drain to represent depleting oxygen — and often the less life the character has, the less breath available for submersion. Similar concept here, except we’re talking up instead of down. As you fly, your energy temporarily depletes — making you all the more vulnerable. As you sustain injury you lose freedom of motion, and you need to think harder about what you’re doing.

So there’s a minor juggling act. Next let’s add gravity and momentum, so the player needs to master the physics of the jet pack — all while avoiding injury and keeping an eye on fuel.

While we’re speaking of momentum, let’s conserve it — meaning recoil. When the character shoots, floating around or otherwise, he is repelled in the opposite direction. The game makes use of this property alongside everything else to construct clever, deliberate logistical problems. Say, you float down a well with spikes at the bottom and along the left wall. To move ahead you need fly below an underhang, just pixels above the tips of the spikes — yet that narrow passage is blocked by a robot sentry. If you shoot the sentry without thinking, chances are you will fly back into the spikes. If you lose control of your flight, chances are you’ll graze the bottom spikes. If you dawdle to think about it, chances are your fuel will run out.

So the levels are nice. The build-up of new concepts is very slow, and indeed there aren’t many to play with — but then the game keeps throwing in new loopholes. When you beat the first fortress and destroy the core, you continue a screen or two to the right and board your little, er, space scooter, which has somehow found its way to the exit. Presto; on to level two. When you beat the second fortress, the screen begins to blink and shake. After way too much time wandering you realize the place is going to blow up. There’s no countdown timer; you just have to intuit that things aren’t right, and bolt back to the entrance fast as you can. Otherwise, game over!

The game’s map designers had more storied careers than its director; the head one, Akio Hanyu, went on to program several of the Kirby games and the first two Smash Bros. games. The others worked on Sylvalion and the GBA e-Reader. (Remember that thing?)

Aesthetically the presentation is all over. The game looks bright, simple, and appealing, but hardly sophisticated. Then you look closer and you notice the backgrounds. What could be a flat color or repeating pattern, and in another game would be, will instead be a complex web of cross-hatching or dithering, the scratches getting denser toward the walls and more scattered in the center of a room. The character seems to have all of four frames of animation, but does he need much more? The same uninspiring music repeats through the whole game, or at least seems to; only the space opera bombast of the main theme really stands out.

Should you die, and you should, the game has a password continue — a short one; maybe only half a dozen characters. Considering its vintage (again possibly pre-Icarus), that’s novel stuff as well.

Air Fortress is a progressive game from an era when that didn’t make much sense. It trades spectacle for concept — and the kind of concept that only someone who designs games or has been playing them for long enough to look at them analytically (much longer than they had existed at the time it was made) would really notice or appreciate. It’s actually a very simple concept, that raises several questions about the assumptions that go into most design — and that works largely because of the game’s careful, didactic level design, that helps to illustrate how very simple the concept is yet how complex its ramifications can be at any given moment.

That concept? That you have a jetpack and a gun, and that every simple little thing you do has consequences. Physics and the energy system make sure of that. I mentioned how the controls bring to mind modern first-person shooters. The energy system calls to mind the “shield” innovation in Halo, and the attention to the physics of every motion is still fairly novel after twenty years.

As I play Air Fortress I think of Fishbane and Hero Core. This might well be their contemporary. The decisions here sort of make the game feel like a modern literate gamer’s idea of 8-bit design, with the benefit of a lifetime of hindsight and with the limited resources and attention span of most indie designers. It’s designed just far enough to make its point, play with its notions, and move along.

These days, that’s all I ask from a game — and it’s all I really have the patience to absorb.

The Genre Drain

  • Reading time:8 mins read

I have made no secret of my annoyance with Steven Moffat’s oversight of Doctor Who. The problems aren’t the ones that you will see people citing in British op-ed columns or fan surveys; they have more to do with Moffat’s personality, or rather the aspects that seep into his work. To my eyes he is desperate to seem clever, and he seems to actively court the adulation of the obsessive. The pursuit of these goals often seems of a greater priority than exploring new concepts, using the show’s structure to explore familiar concepts from a new perspective, communicating to the audience in an emotionally comprehensible way, or even sorting through the logic of his own overwrought plots to make sure that it all adds up.

Davies’ era may have gotten cozy and familiar by the end, and it may at times have over-egged the bold concepts in favor of sensible storylines, but through his entire tenure I always felt that something new was around the corner. Even when the show didn’t work, it felt brave and adventuresome — eager to explore new things. On the successful side we have episodes like “Gridlock” and “Midnight”, that throw caution to the wind to play with big themes, big images that explore the spectrum of human response under extreme conditions. One is erupting with event and scenario; the other is perhaps the single most focused episode in 50 years of Doctor Who. On the problematic side we have things like “Aliens of London”, “Love & Monsters”, and “Last of the Time Lords” — each of which flounders in several respects, but which operates under a stable internal compass: their goal is to explore the consequences of extreme situations so as to examine and, where possible, satirize the mechanics of the world that we live in today.

Davies’ work is outward-looking. Moffat’s stuff is very, very insular.

Case in point — and this is why I’m writing any of this now; I just noticed this on the bus today — is the infusion of new perspectives.

Davies revived the show, came up with a brand new context for it that managed to provide a brand new start for everyone — old viewers, new viewers, the writing staff, the production crew — while allowing space for its history. He then brought in a bunch of people to work on it, because there were too many episodes to write for himself. That first year he brought in four other writers: Moffat, Gatiss, Rob Shearman, and Paul Cornell. Fine, lovely. Despite a few hiccups, he put out one of the best seasons of Doctor Who ever.

The next year was problematic, mostly because of production problems carried over from that first year — so again Davies wound up writing more than he intended. Even so, he brought in four new writers. Of the previous stable, only two returned this year. Year three, he brought in another four writers. By year four the show was about as stable as it would be, and he brought in only two new voices. For the 2009 specials there were only five episodes, and yet for the best of those — “The Waters of Mars” — again he brought in a new writer.

That’s sixteen writers over four and a half production runs. If we ignore the Eccleston series, which to be fair we should, that’s eleven new writers that Davies introduced as the show went on.

Since Moffat has taken over he has introduced five new writers: two in his first series, two in his second, and one in his third (whose work will be broadcast in the spring). That’s nearly as many as Davies would introduce in a single year. Altogether, over three production runs Moffat’s stable consists of just ten writers. Out of 42 episodes, 33 have been written by the same six returning writers — Moffat, Gatiss, Gareth Roberts, Chris Chibnall, Toby Whithouse, and Matthew Graham.

Aside from Moffat none of these writers is particularly bold, dynamic, or visionary. At best they churn out mathematically coherent scripts based on stock themes, character archetypes, and textbook story templates. Although they have written a few surprisingly functional episodes of late (“The Lodger”, “The Power of Three”), Chibnall and Roberts seem to draw from no more practical knowledge or life experience than what it means to be a fan of a TV show. Though more competent, Gatiss is only really interested in pastiche of existing literature. Whithouse and Graham are to my mind interchangeable; creators of successful genre series (Being Human, Life on Mars) that consist of a random fantasy twist applied to a familiar template. The only difference is that Whithouse uses bottled story structure and low-hanging themes to provide his stock characters space to talk at each other, while Graham seems to have no idea how to develop his stories, themes, or stock characters beyond the initial pitch.

Out of Moffat’s five new writers, three have written more than one episode. Gaiman is Moffat’s mirror in inward-looking fan service. Stephen Thompson’s one episode so far has been possibly the least competent or imaginative since the show’s revival, constructed as it is almost entirely of genre cliches with little attempt to examine them, the characters, or the audience’s expectations beyond the surface description. Neil Cross, well! We haven’t seen either of his yet.

So what do we have left? Two new writers, and then one anomaly. Simon Nye, the creator of 1990s sitcom Men Behaving Badly, wrote “Amy’s Choice”; Richard Curtiss, writer of countless romantic comedies such as “Love Actually” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, wrote “Vincent and the Doctor”; and Tom MacRae got his start in screenwriting with the unfortunate 2006 two-parter that reintroduced the Cybermen. Then after five years of experience in the field he came back with the best episode of Moffat’s era, “The Girl Who Waited”.

Each of these guys has only written one episode to date, and it seems unlikely that any of them will write again soon. These are also the only three episodes in Moffat’s era that bring a sense of a distinct outside perspective — and thereby a thematic and emotional inroad to the show. To an extent it makes sense; two of the writers come from different disciplines entirely, and bring with them their training and observations from those fields. MacRae has just grown a hell of a lot as a writer, after jobbing around the TV landscape for half a decade.

I think I’m getting away from my point a bit. What I’m trying to illustrate here is just how insular the show has become since 2010. Under Moffat, the show has become a splatter of self-serving fan-fiction. It’s not just Moffat’s writing; it’s that the show displays little vision aside from Moffat’s writing. Nearly everything points inward; toward fandom, toward prior expectations, toward a celebration of a very narrow, unexamined perspective and experience of life. It’s like someone locked a small group of drop-out nerds in the basement and told them to write to their greatest fantasies. The only outsiders who get to play along are the ones who either cater to or neglect to challenge that nuclear fervor with the burden of context.

I’m not saying that Davies’ other fifteen writers were all brilliant. Heck, six of them make up the core of Moffat’s gang. I’m saying that the variety of voices during Davies’ era — including the touch of the insular — reflects the outward-looking stance of Davies’ own writing, which as a whole makes for a more relevant, inviting, and to me inspirational piece of television. It’s the numbers that justify all of this in my head; noticing the pattern over the years. You can see the sphincter clinching shut, and with it all sense of perspective.

Series 1: 5 new writers
Series 2: 4 new writers
Series 3: 4 new writers
Series 4+specials: 3 new writers
Series 5: 2 new writers
Series 6: 2 new writers
Series 7: 1 new writer

The show dearly needs new writers, from different disciplines, with their own original views on life. Under the current stewardship it’s going down the genre drain. Key question: will Moffat allow in another strong voice to clash with his own? To my eyes that’s the main hurdle here.

Slight addendum: Notice also that up until 2009 Davies managed to produce fourteen episodes a year, and also produce and write for two spin-off series — meaning at the show’s height there were 39 new episodes of Doctor Who in a given year. Even in calendar year 2009 we saw 20 episodes, when you throw in Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Moffat struggles year-on-year just to get a single fourteen-episode series out the door. Between Christmas 2011 and Easter 2013 he has completed just six episodes of Doctor Who. Every month we hear a new excuse, but the problem seems to be a conflict with Moffat’s other series, Sherlock — which itself only runs for three episodes every couple of years.

Seriously? Is that how tightly the sphincter has closed now? I can’t help but correlate the slim quantity with the slim quality, even if I’m not totally sure how one leads to the other. There’s something here, though.