Yearly Archives: 2015

From the North

  • Reading time:3 mins read

That first year of RTD’s Who is acidic about social justice. There are other things going on, but one major nerve is the contempt of the upper classes for the cannon fodder underclass. Whether we’re talking the Slitheen/politicians, the Daleks/mass media, the likes of Lady Cassandra — or even the aspirational Rose, talking to Gwyneth. Rose is working class and should know better; indeed she chided the Doctor one episode earlier. But she so wants to pass as middle-class. This aspiration, or vague sense of entitlement, is one of her major character flaws that gets her into trouble again and again.

“Why do you sound like you’re from the North?” she asks, unsure whether someone with an accent like that could genuinely have as much authority as the Doctor seems to. That he could really be someone. She doesn’t make a big deal of it, but it’s part of her preconceptions. One more beat among many.

Adam’s contempt comes back and bites him. Jack’s almost sets off an apocalypse — but he manages to ground himself, and find redemption. For Rose’s part, the first chance she gets she also turns her new status to her own advantage — or tries to — by changing her own past. That doesn’t go well either.

That whole run of episodes is threaded with this subtle point of distinction between putting on airs, acting better than others, and actual self-improvement. Which is to say, seeing beyond the lot you’ve been handed and working toward good, versus trying to climb the ladder by putting your boot in people’s faces, knowing that your new status will protect you from the consequences.

That ongoing discussion of our social roles and responsibilities to each other, mixed with flimsy satire about the structures that make us turn against our own self-interests and those of our neighbors, is just… important. Paper-thin jabs about massive weapons of destruction aside, the basic discussion at hand is wound so tightly into the stories and the characters and the way that they speak to each other that it doesn’t stand out as outright grandstanding — but rather a sort of furious lead by example.

Davies is an angry man, extremely cynical about the world that he lives in, and it comes through in his urgency for us to just treat each other as people and to be curious and interested in what’s happening around us, and why, and how.

The casting of Eccleston as the Doctor just anchors all of this discussion — as does Piper’s depiction of Rose. No other Doctor/companion combination would really lend itself to the discussion that goes on over these thirteen episodes.

The Death of Design

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Codification of a schema needs to be considered a regressive step, that limits future discussion by narrowing acceptable language. The moment you define what a thing is supposed to be, all meaningful inquiry will immediately shut down in deference to that definition.

Current charts of the growth and development of a form tend to be lists of landmark cases where frameworks were defined forevermore. For videogames, let’s say Super Metroid. Or A Link to the Past. Dracula’s Curse, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 — all of these idealized moments when something was crystalized as the template for all future discussion.

I am going to counter that these lists are in fact lists of the death of a form; of every turn where its potential was narrowed and stripped away. Any progressive chart of a form will list branching points where new and valuable concepts were introduced to the language. New potential. New nouns, new verbs, new adjectives. New examples of an expressive functional application of the form. Not definitions; propositions.

This is why, for me, game design began its slow death with Super Mario Bros. — not through any fault of the game itself, but rather through its canonization and codification. The SNES only cemented the rot, after which there has been no escape. I don’t know that we’ll ever escape it. This medium is rotten at its core.

A Deeper Pool

  • Reading time:7 mins read

The biggest problem with New Who lies in the writers pool. With the exception of the two showrunners, few unusually talented or original writers return after writing one or two scripts. With the exception of the two showrunners, every writer who has contributed more than two scripts has demonstrated a talent somewhere between mediocre and diabolical. Many of those have improved over the years; since 2010 Gareth Roberts has shown competence bordering on genuine artistic value. With each script, Mark Gatiss grows less disposable. Others, like Toby Whithouse, seem unable to think in terms outside of a writer’s course he took fifteen years ago. (Yes, lad. You would make Robert McKee proud. You nailed every item on that list, and failed to fall down the stairs along the way. Good job.) Yet every time there’s a fresh voice, offering a life perspective outside of the experience of a middle-aged white male middle class sci-fi fan with few other interests, he delivers one script, maybe two, then vanishes forever. (And yes, it has always been a he. The only female writer to date was on the diabolical end, edging toward mediocrity, and she was at the time the show’s primary script editor — so not exactly an outside perspective.)

What was rather distressing is that prior to 2014 the number of new writers seemed to diminish with each passing year. Over Moffat’s tenure the cast of characters became even more entrenched than in Davies’ era. Aside from a few glorious (often celebrity) one-shots like Simon Nye (Amy’s Choice) and Richard Curtis (Vincent & the Doctor), mostly we just see the same few uninspired names over and over — sometimes growing and improving their craft, sometimes not so much. Series 6, the year of Moffat’s horrifying sci-fi rape plot, was where the situation became really clear: this show is no longer about new or novel perspectives on life. It’s about dumb sci-fi nerds, and what they think is cool or surprising. At that point that status quo wasn’t much better than videogame or American comic book fandom.

The second half of series seven was a little better, thanks to the deeply ingrained efforts of Neil Cross — whose other show, Luther, has never quite clicked with me, but it’s a hell of a lot more literate than Life on Mars or Being Human — but the show was still treading water, relying too much on familiarity and gimmickry.

Then came 2014, and the show became something else. Moffat seemed to clue up to all of his own bad habits and tackle them head-on. In the first half of the series he took an active role in co-writing most of the old guard’s scripts, all of which manage a refreshing layer of character or thematic resonance despite the familiar nuts-and-bolts story material underneath. In the second half, it’s all new guys — plus Moffat’s ballsiest story ever. Most of the scripts are brilliant. The ones that don’t work are at least brave. They go for something bizarre, and if they don’t nail it — well, okay. At least they use their premises to ask interesting questions, make unusual observations. Kill the Moon has the worst understanding of grade school physics that I’ve ever seen, to the point that it makes me a little angry to think about — yet the basic idea is so bewilderingly strange that I applaud the effort, and it contains a couple of the best individual dramatic character moments that the show has ever presented. Peter Harness needed an editorial pass from a third-grader, but fuck if he didn’t bring something new and useful to the show. Jamie Mathieson came straight from screen-adapting Douglas Adams to write two of the best episodes of 21st-century Who — one on the basis of good ideas well explored; the other on exquisite control of his craft. Frank Contrell Boyce wrote some of the most observant, believable lines given to a child character in a TV show. If he also failed basic physics, he at least did it in the name of (seemingly sincere) poetry.

So, we now seem to know the script roster for 2015. It’s all two-parters this year, which means six stories of 90 minutes in length. The first and last are by Moffat, naturally enough. On recent form, I figure he’s got things under control. We’ve got a two-parter by Whithouse, which… I hope will be enough to convince anyone that his biggest successes have been flukes due to factors outside his actual authorial value. There’s an apparent two-parter by Gatiss, which I actually anticipate — maybe with that amount of space he will be able to explore the nuances of his perspective rather than just wallow in nostalgia and hit plot points.

That leaves two out of six stories, four out of twelve episodes to fill. Well, we know that one of them is split peculiarly between a Mathieson/Moffat team and Catherine Tregenna — Mathieson of the two series 8 stunners, and Tregenna of the absolute best Torchwood episodes to lie outside of Children of Earth. That may sound like faint praise, but Out of Time and Captain Jack Harkness are truly lovely, nuanced scripts and the only times that the show actually lived up to its ostensible premise. I always wondered why she never graduated to the main show — and now she has, granted in a peculiar script arrangement. So this should be interesting.

Now we know the final author — and it’s our Moon Dragon Man. Peter Harness is back to alternately infuriate and inspire. Given the scope of his last script (in which the Moon is revealed as an egg — and then when it hatches, threatening the entire planet, the Doctor deliberately runs off to force Clara into deciding for herself how to handle the situation), I am curious what he will do with 90 minutes. This seems like an experiment worth undertaking. How whacked-out is this going to be, and how will it use that to explore characters and consequences? And how simultaneously unsubtle and confusing will its metaphors be, this time around? I don’t really like his last script, but I respect his voice — and I want to see more of it. It’s so strange, and what it lacks in logistical rigor it more than makes up for with human insight. Which is what the show has substantially lacked under Moffat, and up until last year.

So, yes. This year looks like it will be interesting. An experimental structure, which simultaneously brings us back to 20th century Who and offers a chance for unusual breadth and consequence and exploration of topics promised in the previous series, with its long lingering scenes and extended conversations, that thanks to its development environment 20th century Who mostly only hinted toward. We’ve got fewer writers than most years, yet a good balance of dull and pointed and more space for each to make its case, use its voice to do something distinctive. I know to only expect four episodes of tedium, and even then with all of the pressure of filling 90 minutes of screentime they can’t possibly be throwaway stories. So even that will be curious to see.

I’m with it. I think this will turn out well.