Yearly Archives: 2017

Half-Baked

  • Reading time:7 mins read

Bad-ass title sequence aside, the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era is the period that nearly broke Doctor Who. Same as the Lennie Briscoe era of Law & Order. It’s where the show found its successful formula, settled in, and learned to coast. This is Doctor Who at its most dangerously comfortable. (Note how many people perceive this era as “correct” Doctor Who, and extrapolate or compare its tendencies to the show as a whole.) It’s not until circa 1987 that the show started to get systemically weird again, in a way that let the show continue to grow and breathe and live (Much like seasons 18-20 of Law & Order!), and led into its modern-day incarnation. (Unlike Law & Order!)

It’s not that the era is awful; it doesn’t do much for me, but there are some nice parts (Deadly Assassin, say). If I’m hard on it, it’s less about the era in itself than about the negative influence it had on the show going forward. Like, if after Hinchcliffe and Holmes left, the show had gone in a wildly different direction again, then fine. Things change; they move on. We try things, then we try something else.

But this is where the show achieved a sort of stasis, both in terms of its future creative momentum and its public perception. It’s not even the most interesting stasis they could have picked for the show. Yes, let’s rip off a popular horror movie and put the TARDIS in the middle. Inspiration incarnate. What galls me is how quickly this became What Doctor Who Is, and anything that varied from the formula was wrong. It’s so daft that even the serials within the Hinch/Holmes era that don’t match the template (e.g., Android Invasion) are considered awful, no matter what neat ideas they may bring to the table. They’re different, so they’re wrong.

Which, for a show like Doctor Who, which more than any TV program I can think of, embodies and glorifies change, is very nearly a profane mode of thought.

Again, it’s not like the Hinch/Holmes vision is invalid. It’s as worth exploring as anything, and resulted in a few epiphanies (Deadly Assassin, again). But then it had to keep moving, and it didn’t. It started into a downward spiral of trying to maintain or replicate or work against these few months of production. All of Doctor Who became a precursor to or an attempt to return to this supposed glory period, when the show had become so very small and isolated. It nearly destroyed everything.

There are other weird things that crystallized here as The Way Things Are Meant To Be, even though they never really were before. Like, the way old-school fans today muse and scoff about the notion of story arcs and long-form storytelling. Doctor Who stories are all supposed to be self-contained! That way you can watch them in any order and nothing matters! But… until season 13, that was never the case. In the 1960s, serials all ran into each other; characters often harked back to events from weeks earlier, even if it was a different story entirely. The Hartnell era is full of rather complex character development. The Pertwee era makes far less sense out-of-sequence, as stories are constantly referring to what happened before, and B-plots develop over the course of multiple seasons. (See the Mike Yates thread in the last couple of seasons.) The Doctor’s situation, and its relation to the Master’s situation, are in a state of continual development. It’s all vibrant, alive. Then after Barry Letts moved on from his supervisory role in season 12, the show just became a movie-of-the-week thing, with little to no context. And, Bidmead and Cartmel aside, this largely became the status quo for the remainder of the original run.

Then there’s the cast makeup. Pertwee had changed the dynamic by turning the Doctor into an individual action hero — the star of the show, rather than the anchor of an ensemble cast — but he still was surrounded by an expanded regular or semi-regular cast, to flesh out storytelling as needed. This is I think an element that allowed the Pertwee era to be so much more sophisticated, on a narrative level, than what had come before: it had more roles to employ, in a greater number of capacities — and you didn’t necessarily have to use them all, every week. It’s even more of an ensemble than it was before. Hinchcliffe and Holmes strip that right away, especially after the Letts legacy of season 12, and again basically boil the show down to the bare necessities and divorce it of any greater context or narrative potential or significance. One Doctor, who now is very clearly the show’s hero rather than a catalyst for the main character(s), and one lady who’s largely there to make the Doctor look smart and give him someone to talk to.

To my view, this is just as damaging a systemic collapse as the absolution of continuity. We’re going down a path to an unsupportable level of stasis, which will lead to the exact kind of irrelevance that plagued the show throughout the 1980s. Granted, someone of greater creative talent could still elevate the show, as happened in seasons 18 and 24-26, then again from 2005. But if you will, the entropy had now set in. Everything else would be a struggle, and the show’s end was ordained. What had to happen in 2005, for the show to work again, was to strip away most of the damage done during seasons 13-14, and return it to a model more closely aligned to the last time the show worked under its own steam — namely the Pertwee era. Which Davies has made a point of declaring, over and over, what he was doing. Making a new Pertwee era. Ergo his quoting the start of Spearhead at the start of each new series.

The Pertwee era was, more often than not, about something larger than itself. It used Doctor Who as a platform for social, political commentary. Explorations of colonialism, capitalism, indigenous rights, apartheid, consumerism, the military industrial complex, environmentalism, early feminism, isolationism. Dicks and Letts go on the record that they felt there was no point in telling a story unless it was about something. And then there’s the Malcolm Hulke influence.

By comparison, the Hinch/Holmes goal was to “scare the little fuckers,” as phrased on one of the DVD extras. And it largely approached this narrow goal through borrowed glory, hollowing out existing horror stories and putting the TARDIS in the resulting cavity.

This is not as sustainable a mission. It’s a smaller view. It’s an easier view. It’s a safe template because it means you can just plug things in without having to worry about any greater significance.

This is the era when Doctor Who began its descent into irrelevance because of its conscious self-isolation from structural and thematic elements that would allow it to meaningfully grow or adapt.

This is where the cult of No Meaning finds its roots.

No continuity in MY Doctor Who!

No character development in Doctor Who.

No cultural commentary.

No political commentary.

The Doctor must be the sole hero.

The sole assistant must keep to her place.

The show must not challenge my preconceptions or make me think about anything other than plot.

Doxtor Who is entertainment only. It must not try to engage me in a discussion. It must hew to my specific desire.

This is poisonous.

From here, development becomes a simple question of how “light” or “dark” the show can afford to be, which leads to decisions like putting Eric Saward in control for half the 1980s.

Though you lose a few nice trinkets here and there (The Deadly Assassin, season 18, Douglas Adams), the show would be so much better off to just regenerate Pertwee into McCoy. I honestly don’t think you lose much, and you retain the momentum built up through the first 11 years, that the following 12 so thoroughly squandered.

The Cosmology of Doctor Who

  • Reading time:2 mins read

So we know that Doctor Who’s cosmology is different from ours. There, the Moon was (according to 1970s theory) an adopted planetoid… which was, in fact, an egg.

Bizarre thing is, Kill the Moon actually fits classic Who’s jump-the-gun science, that Chibnall said “duh” and perpetuated 40 years later. More than fits it; it makes sense of it.

In the Who timeline, where I guess Earth formed around a (coincidentally egg-laden) Racnoss ship, Gaia (early pre-Earth) must never have collided with Theia (another rocky planet in our orbit, that shattered on collision), as seems to have happened in our world.

What this seems to imply, then, is that in the Who timeline Theia must have remained in Gaia’s solar orbit, somewhere far enough back that the two never collided.

Why didn’t they collide? Possibly that Racnoss ship; it may have altered the early accretion of proto-planetary debris just enough to butterfly (er, spider?) effect away a different spacing and possibly greater mass for the two proto-planets.

Which is to say, the fuckery in Kill the Moon just happens to be consistent with the Silurian recounting of events (as RTD’s weird whimsy), which in turn makes Mondas plausible.

Thanks to Peter Harness, somehow a mountain of awful and/or outdated science balances out to plausible consistency.

All praise the Egg.

SR388: A Spelunker’s Nightmare

  • Reading time:8 mins read

[ The following post is assembled from fragments of discussion from July 2014, October 2014, July 2016, and August 2017. ]

Long before that AM2R thing, which is exactly what a cynical observer would predict from a fan remake, I’ve often rambled about ways to do a sensitive update of Metroid II, that (unlike AM2R) honors the original game’s tone and thematic material and develops it even further, makes the game even more awkward and upsetting to play:

I still think the best way to tackle a remake is to consider the affect of the original, and try to recreate it. The original is claustrophobic, in part due to feeling lost — sameness, lack of a map — in part to the screen.

So, make light a scarce quantity. The world would be desaturated and have a big focus on environmental light sources — lava, certain bioluminescent plants or animals, Chozo technology. At times it’s hard to see anything. Sort of a Silent Hill aspect.

Samus’s suit may project a slight glow around her, reflecting on things. Generally the glow would extend about as far as the boundaries of the GB screen. Occasionally more or less. The glow from Samus’ suit would give things a sort of monotone hue. Maybe greenish, from her visor.

If you wanted to expand on the game, you could give her various kinds of light beam. Or make her suit glitch out. Maybe special heat and X-ray visors would be needed to navigate certain areas. Glitchily. It would be all grainy and prone to error. Make it go totally dark, for a scripted segment here or there, in the spirit of those segments where you have to blindly fumble around in ball form. Maybe you have to navigate by noise and touch. Maybe a sort of a sonar, so you can hear when the Metroids are getting close.

There might be an attempt at a map, but it doesn’t work right. Glitchy. Staticky. Suggests non-Euclidean space. Some key parts of the interior may not make any sort of euclidean geometric sense. They kind of don’t, already.

This would also play up some of the Zelda-style risk-and-reward progress limitation. You CAN go down there, but… should you?

Also see: Dragon Warrior, Phantasy Star II, Lost in Blue.

But, that’s if I were pressed to reinterpret the game. Insofar as its native form on the Game Boy, Metroid II is basically perfect. The worst I can say is that the control can get a little mushy at times. Speed up Samus’ movement by 125%, maybe tighten collision and response time. Little stuff like that.

Something I really dig about Metroid II is that as designed, it wouldn’t really make as much sense on another console. If you play through as an adult, with a modicum of design literacy in hand, it soon becomes clear to what extent the game actively uses its technical and conceptual limitations to say its own thing.

Unlike Super Metroid the world that it draws doesn’t feel like a playground set up for your benefit. It’s just there. If it’s confusing, then it would be, wouldn’t it. You’re invading this space that was never meant for a thing like you.

The game’s affect is just so subjective.The way the Spider Ball is used nails down how unfriendly the space is. This is a space where we really shouldn’t be, and it’s just by the skin of this overpowered miraculous thing that it works.

When you get to the cramped corridor forcing you to draw a visual parallel between Samus in ball form and the unhatched Metroid egg, there’s not a lot of space left (as it were) to question how expressive the design is meant to be.

It’s supposed to be claustrophobic. It’s meant to be disorienting and upsetting. You’re supposed to lose your way and freak out, the way you probably would in reality if you were dropped into an unmapped hole in the ground on an alien world. Or even ours. Even if mapped. It’s meant to be distressing, in no small part because you shouldn’t be there. The mission is wrong. You are playing the bad guy.

That’s not reading into it. In its closing moments the game tells you how you messed up, and Fusion‘s plot is based on this revelation. (Another irritating thing about Super Metroid is how it not only glosses over this failing; it compounds it. But Fusion gets the story back.) Fusion also gets the claustrophobia and tension back, in a shifted form, where Super throws them out in favor of Whee Shiny Perfect Action.

As far as how Metroid II uses the resources it has, the only thing I would treat differently is the lava. To quote one of many earlier discussions on the topic,

That goddamned lava. What is that? Of all the ways to limit progress. I mean… I can make up some silly theories that kind of work. But how arbitrary is that? At least it’s an apparent phenomenon of the gameworld, even if it’s triggered by discrete player-dependent flags.

Instead of progress clearly resulting from the player’s action it’s just, “What the hell was that rumble? Oh… there’s… a route here. Was it here before? I don’t think so.” Granted, it doesn’t affect me when I’m playing. It’s just in retrospect that it’s so incredibly clumsy and weird.

Of course the game is pretty linear, and it can’t let you miss a Metroid. If there were some narrative rationalization, maybe that would be enough. But then you’re in danger of needless exposition.

On reflection, I would add a horrible piercing screech after the extermination of each set of Metroids and before the earthquake and lava drain. Each time, as Samus strayed deeper into the caverns, the screech would get louder and longer, while the screen would shake with ramping violence. Toward the end, it basically would peak all of the sound output and leave the game a nauseating shaky-cam mess for minutes at a time.

This would serve many purposes.

  • It would make the game more disorienting and upsetting to play.
  • It would introduce the Queen early as Samus’s opponent.
  • It would establish the Queen’s growing pain and anger.
  • It would help to underline that maybe Samus isn’t quite doing the right thing here.
  • And it would resolve the structural weirdness around the lava, which as it stands is a VERY CONVENIENT and unexplained progress limiter.

All of this would be totally doable on the Game Boy. Pretty easy, even, in this engine. Everything’s already set up, pretty much. Just add a screech that gets louder and longer each time, and make the screen rumble longer and more violent each time. That’s all! But, it would make such a big difference to the game’s narrative flow, logical consistency, and thematic unity.

Would this change be on-the-nose, in terms of the game’s themes? Maybe. But done well, it wouldn’t be clear what was happening at first. It’d just add a layer of “huh?”, growing to “oh hell.”

Right now there’s little feedback to completing each wave, and the mild rumble has little impact, the lava drain nothing like an explanation. This would add at least a sense of intentionality to the design, which as designed leaves room for interpretation, yes, but also feels sloppy.

Significantly, all of the scream’s and the rumble’ thematic resonance becomes clear only in retrospect. You get ramping uncomfortable chaos as you burrow in, but aside from feeling increasingly intimidated, it’s only clear what’s happening when you finally meet the Queen, which snaps it all into focus.

Currently there is no clear moment of epiphany, and the Queen’s role consists of sitting there, unseen, until you burst in and kill her. The epiphany comes with the egg, which is great. Really great, actually. But its significance would be enhanced, coming out of the catharsis of that encounter with the thing that had been expressing pain the whole time. “Oh hell,” you’d think, “so that’s what has been happening all along. What… does all of this mean? What have I done?” And then, a baby Metroid imprints on you.

You’re still free to interpret however you like, but this gives a touch of emotional feedback and clarity to undermine any sense of bravado. And all it is is a screech and a more violent screen shake. That’s all it takes to snap it all into focus.

Walks like a Duck, Quacks like a Duck

  • Reading time:6 mins read

So, yeah. DuckTales 2017 is, as many predicted, almost more of a re-adaptation of the Duck comics than of the 1987 show. It has the optics: Donald is present as a key team member, Scrooge is in his Comic colors, there are Ben Day dots all over the place. Whatever. But, Jesus.

I mean, seriously, this goes straight back to the comics. And not just Carl Barks. I mean Don Rosa. The first episode combs through Life & Times, with portraits of Scrooge’s parents, a lineage chart for the nephews that includes Hortense and Quackmore, and just generally way more awareness of and investment in the comic mythology, as focused and enhanced by Rosa.

Scrooge and Donald carry something more like their comic personas. Donald is about 60/40 Comic Don versus Cartoon Don here — still recognizably the guy who you can depend on to throw walnuts at Chip & Dale out of spite, but also a more layered character. The Comic Donald is a simple, lazy, fairly unlucky guy way out of his depth in every part of his life. Part of his laziness seems to be a zoned-out avoidance because he can’t handle the life he’s been dealt. But, importantly, when he’s really needed he always steps up and is willing to get, you know, shot in the face if need be to live up to his obligations or protect the people he cares about. He’s a sympathetic character in the way that Cartoon Donald could never be. He also speaks like a normal person, with his own curious idioms and speech patterns, as opposed to an incomprehensible squawkbox. That cartoon element is still present in 2017 Don, because people would flip out if they changed it, but it seems to be played as one more of a million things that makes the poor guy’s life hell. He can’t even get a sentence out, and his lack of an ability to communicate only fuels his bad temper.

Scrooge, meanwhile, is back to being the largely self-centered, irresponsible figure he is in the comics. The first episode goes to great lengths to contrast the two uncles’ parenting styles; whereas Donald is paranoid and overprotective because of his own experiences with life, always on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop, always sleepy from his against-his-nature vigilance against the horrors of life that may at any moment pounce on his nephews, Scrooge just doesn’t give a damn. He has no regard for danger, and often stirs more trouble than he expects or immediately knows how to handle. But he’s sure he’ll think of something. Which totally Freaks Donald Out.

Long ago he used to assist Scrooge on his adventures, but by the time we catch up here he’d long since distanced himself from Scrooge, to the extent that the nephews barely seem aware that Scrooge was a relative.

Since this is 2017, there also seem to be some ongoing story threads. The very final shot of the pilot ought to be interesting, as it dives right into the biggest unexplained mystery in all iterations of the Duck universe. This is like “why exactly did the Doctor leave Gallifrey?” business. A thing that even Don Rosa steered way clear of touching, except in a passing manner in a late chapter of Life & Times.

It also is consciously DuckTales, in that it borrows from the earlier show’s iconography enough to call itself DuckTales. And then borrows from Darkwing Duck, and TaleSpin, and Goof Troop. More than just DuckTales, the show seems to be quietly setting up a new Disney Duck Animated Universe.

You’ve got most of the original DuckTales characters who aren’t useless or annoying (no Doofus or Bubba, I so hope — have yet to hear anything), but they’re remixed and employed in functional roles here. Duckworth is pretty much gone (though I’ve read he’ll appear in some form, later?), while the more-vital Launchpad and Ms. Beakley step into that void and split his duties. Beakley is more vital because she comes with Webby — who now, instead of being, uh, plot luggage, has been upgraded to an audience surrogate — so she’s been made a more general and much more capable personal assistant. Launchpad is just a general hired hand/chauffeur, no matter the vehicle or task. He’s incompetent at everything, but he’s game and presumably he’s inexpensive.

Then you’ve got the odd changes brought about by the 1987 series, which the 2017 one just runs with. Glomgold is not just Scottish (instead of South African, as in the comics); he’s so Scottish that he constantly talks about how Scottish he is. Which… come to think of it may be overcompensation. Is he genuinely Scottish? The way this is set up, I’d be unsurprised to see a long game in here.

Anyway. This is really well-done. The pilot at least is very smart and well-written. They seem to have thought this project through in insane modern showrunner sort of detail, with hints and seeds of future adventures and character development and revelations strewn all over. And nearly everything the characters do, every plot that they embark on, has its roots in character, and in the show’s basic themes (which are themselves rooted in character). You know how Buffy‘s monsters are all projections of the characters’ anxieties and the emotional things they’re going through that week? This is kind of like that, except with Barks/Rosa style adventures that illuminate family tensions and anxieties.

Like, in the pilot, Donald reluctantly leaves the nephews with Scrooge, whom again they’d never met and it seems like Donald has rarely if ever mentioned around them, issuing him (not them) a stern warning to behave while he’s off, because he needs someone to watch them while he goes off on a job interview. That interview happens to be with Glomgold, who Donald is dense or self-absorbed enough not to clock as Scrooge’s arch-nemesis. So while Scrooge gets carried away and winds up on an adventure with the nephews and Webby, Donald ends up becoming Glomgold’s own personal Launchpad. All of which is structurally really cool and which serves as a perfect canvas for exploring what’s going on within and between all the characters, and why it is that Donald is so pissed off with his uncle.

Which… may or may not have something to do with that final shot, again, and that unspoken mystery at the heart of Duckdom.

Twelve Thoughts

  • Reading time:10 mins read

I’m staggering into well-trod ground here, I realize, but bear with me. I’m going to lay out a series of thoughts, and let’s see where they may lead.

Thought #1: Steven Moffat has been on a mission lately to wrap up dangling story threads, from River Song and her screwdriver to Simm’s regeneration into Gomez, to the “missing” regenerations between old series and new, to generally resetting the show to its factory settings (as well as that’s even a thing) for the next show-runner to make use of at will — putting Gallifrey back in the sky, putting the Doctor on the run, returning major foes to recurring status. Not all of these threads are his own; some, he inherited from Davies. Some predate Davies, to an extent. If there’s a loop to close, late-era Moffat has gone out of his way to close it.

Thought #2: Moffat also has gone out of his way to cater to Capaldi’s whims. Capaldi said over and over how much he’d like to face off against the Mondasian Cybermen; how if he was to go out, how great it would be to be done in by one of them. Moffat scoffed, and he scoffed. But, look what happened. He’s been sending the scripts (e.g., the upcoming special) past Capaldi for review, taking on board minor and major suggestions, and altering them accordingly. In turn, Capaldi, being a fan since the show’s beginning, has his share of suggestions — not all realistic, but many well-informed and well-intentioned.

Thought #3: In wrapping up his era — in fact, the whole “revival” era of Doctor Who — Moffat is not only returning the show to its factory settings. He’s bringing Capaldi back to his own first memories of the show. Capaldi gets his own Mondasian Cybermen, which is fine — and then as he denies his regeneration he’s transported back to the Doctor’s first encounter with those same Cybermen, which is in turn the Doctor’s first regeneration. Dramatically, this is some good stuff: some by-the-book thematic mirroring, to draw clear metaphors and enhance semiotic coherence amongst far-flung events, creating a sense of epiphany and oneness. It’s kind of like Chekhov’s Gun, or advanced intercutting (a technique with which Moffat overtly experimented throughout series 8, e.g. in “Listen” and “Into the Dalek”), in terms of James Burke-ing a sense of holistic significance on the chaotic and often desperate causality that tends to define the show’s narrative.

Thought #4: Moffat not only hews to Capaldi’s whims; he also seems to take an impish glee in running with off-handed remarks that tickle him enough for Moffat to make mental notes, e.g. the Doctor’s electric guitar. There were no plans to insert an electric guitar into the show, but after the first series Moffat asked Capaldi what changes he’d like to see; Capaldi had no clue, so, being an ex punk rocker, he joked about putting a guitar amp in the console room. Of course that would be silly; he just didn’t didn’t know how to respond to the question, in that moment. So, for no reason other than to rise to the ridiculousness of the suggestion, Moffat did as he wasn’t really told. Likewise at a convention panel, in response to Moffat’s canned joke about Hartnell not returning his calls for the 50th anniversary special Capaldi fleetingly suggested they could have got David Bradley in. And Moffat had a Larry David moment, staring off into space and thinking, “Oh.” So, lo, William Hartnell’s impostor is the Fender Stratocaster of series 10.

Thought #5: There is one glaring, famous unresolved thread of continuity to this series that presents itself in every clip show, at the show’s every anniversary, that people tend to collectively pull up their collars and avoid mentioning, lest they stray into “Paul McGann is the Rani” territory. You just don’t go there, for some reason, like it’s an unwritten law. For someone of Moffat’s impulses and humor, that challenge must seem awfully tempting.

Thought #6: Moffat is not exactly known for the expansiveness of his toolbox. In Capaldi’s era he’s become more adept at using his few tricks more constructively to tell meaningful stories, as opposed to flashing them around at the audience to show how shiny his tools all are (see: the Matt Smith era). Still, his scripts are typified by a few concepts that he uses over and over again. For instance, out-of-sync relationships with extreme time gaps. We first see this with Reinette, where we meet her as a girl, then a few minutes later as an adult, then eventually the Doctor pauses too long yammering about the plot only to find her dead — that he just missed her by moments. The same concept is remixed a bit for River Song, is worked into a monster-based story for “Blink” (e.g., when Sally turns her back only for Kathy to turn up dead, her note for Sally as delivered by a relative echoing Reinette’s for the Doctor), becomes basically the entire basis for Amy Pond, nearly becomes Clara’s exit in “Last Christmas”, and has some of its final echoes in the way Capaldi’s Doctor misses Bill by just a few hours, as a result of getting distracted by exposition back at the top of the ship. Moffat has a half-dozen patterns that he uses over and over, but this one seems to be his favorite.

Thought #7: Earlier, between the filming of series 8 and 9, a certain actor from the show’s past visited the current production and was shown by Capaldi around the TARDIS set. He said to that actor, oh, you need to come back, seriously. Then he went to Moffat, and said, oh, Steven, wouldn’t it be great to see them back? Moffat gave a non-committal response, as one does to that luvvie nonsense. Yeah, sure. Everyone should come back. Put them all in a boat with a single oar, and see what happens. We’ll broadcast it exclusively in IMAX at 2 a.m. Apply in the affirmative; nod and smile; yes, of course, let’s do it. Now let’s move on.

Thought #8: As further evidenced by the selling point of the forthcoming Christmas special, Moffat sort of a has a thing for screwing around with Hartnell’s continuity. He’s had Clara visit the Doctor as a young boy, then several hundred years later shown a splinter of her interfere with the Doctor’s choice of an escape capsule. Outside of the modern era, there’s no other part of the classic series that Moffat has shown such a significant and repeated interest in reinterpreting. This interest is starting to border on an obsession, and considering that Moffat is now brazenly dancing into the events surrounding Hartnell’s regeneration — something already fairly well-documented if one ignores that the episode in question is in fact missing — one wonders how deep this obsession will go.

Thought #9: Throughout series 10 — and here, if you’ve somehow been glazed over with my argument so far, you should be ready to groan — the Doctor has two photographs on his desk, representing the painful dangling threads of his family. One of those, Moffat took the care to resolve two Christmases ago, so for us her portrait is more of a recent, rather warm, reminder — though for the Doctor it’s a certain recent and raw trauma, as obliquely addressed in his Missy flashbacks. The other portrait is the one we’re not supposed to talk about, lest we look like total loons. And yet there it is, receiving regular camera focus — a recent continuity reminder, sitting with equal status beside what we must interpret as another deep-dive continuity reference, of the sort the show seems to do more and more under Moffat (e.g., Hartnell’s face turning up on that dingy machine in “Vincent and the Doctor”). Which is fine. Though, the camera really does like to focus there.

Thought #10: It has become something of a modern series cliche at this point that at the moment of regeneration the Doctor revisits the companions of his recent past. David Tennant’s narcissistic Doctor claimed his “reward” by visiting every major companion of his era, including threatening to bring on a paradox by visiting Rose several months before she ever met him — or, rather, met his previous incarnation. Smith’s Doctor had his weird “Head Amy” moment while Clara stared on. The recent trailer confirmed that Pearl Mackie is making one last round this Christmas, despite apparently having left in the previous episode, and well-informed whispers suggest that her predecessor has also put in at least a cameo.

Thought #11: At the start of the recent trailer, we were graced with a tampered Hartnell quote. It wasn’t the quote, the quote that you’ll always expect someone to use, for instance at the start of The Five Doctors (the previous time that Hartnell’s Doctor was recast with a not-quite lookalike); it was a moment from Hartnell’s final serial, into the final moments of which Moffat has chosen to insert his own final script for the show — in much the way that Hartnell’s visage weirdly morphs into David Bradley, to misdeliver his last few words. The quote used for the trailer was appropriate for its provenance, and yet because of its positioning and because of the expectations set about by prior art, it is conspicuously not the quote that we’re looking for. If anything, it seems to undermine that expectation. To read in some possibly unwarranted motivation, almost to misdirect from that expected quote — and by so doing, to create a dissonance that sets up a certain subconscious expectation.

Thought #12: In the recent past, Moffat has shown great willingness to bring back old characters when it suits the story, and to totally refuse to unless it does. In the forthcoming special alone, we’re already bringing back the (recast) first Doctor, and — to enormous surprise — a recast Polly Wright in some capacity. Clearly bringing back the two of them suits the story that he wants to tell about Capaldi’s Doctor. About facing the regrets and the pain and exhaustion that prevent him from feeling entitled to, or even to want, redemption. It seems to me there’s one deep regret that the Doctor has never addressed, that his fourth and twelfth incarnations may both share with a similar (if in one case more present) ache. If the Doctor is going to move on, and unreservedly accept a new, unburdened life, it may be some therapy to release that pain.

All of which is to say, the Doctor never did come back, did he. At least, not in dramatic terms, in the primary continuity of the television show. He made a bad call, and he knows it, and he’s been avoiding it ever since.

And, all things considered, it seems to me this may at last be his moment of catharsis.

What’s in a name (e.g., Sonic Mania)?

  • Reading time:10 mins read

So, on Twitter, John Thyer pointed out a tweet suggesting that the new 2D Sonic the Hedgehog game, over which the Internet has obsessed for the last 12 months, is meant to be of the scale of STI’s (that initialism grows all the more pertinent with time) split 1994-ish opus, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles. This was an ambitious game that, as with many Sonic Team affiliated projects, didn’t meet its deadline, so was hurriedly completed — only to be patched with a second cartridge several months later, containing what was left of the original game plus a surplus of new “content” to justify selling a whole second cartridge. Lock the two cartridges together, and they merge into a monster platforming epic that overstays its welcome by about two-thirds yet that a certain demographic will nonetheless cite as the epitome of its form. It certainly is the epitome of something. I’ll give ’em that.

Anyway. I groused a bit that this claim was not a promising sign, which led to the predictable Twitter push-back. Though, the format of that push-back was a little strange. The claim there was, hang on, Sonic 3&K is the perfect length! It had fourteen whole levels! What, did I want it to be 20 levels more more? Was I nuts?

Uh. Well, uh. Hm.

Let’s dial back a bit, and redefine what we’re talking about.

[The following, I shall repeat directly from Twitter. Consequently, there will be a certain degree of ramble.]

Fourteen “levels” [more properly, Zones — which matters; see below] is, like, three times too many. Especially since half of them are terrible. Sonic 2 was already too long by 1/3 or so. The original Sonic the Hedgehog is just about the ideal length. You get a nice variety. You can explore and master every level. It doesn’t overstay. You can replay. The one thing I’d say against Sonic 1 is, we don’t need to iterate a zone’s concept three times before moving on. Do act 2, boss, move on.

It’s like. Compare.

How many times have you played a game of Tetris, versus how many times have you completed Final Fantasy X for fun? Any time I want to spend half an hour, I can play straight through Sonic 1, have a slightly different and complete experience. Sonic 3 & Knuckles? No way.

You know the best 2D Mario game? Super Mario Land. Lots of reasons why, but a really big draw? You can beat it in 20 minutes. I have never beaten Super Mario World, and I can assure you that it will never, ever, ever happen. There’s too much “content” for the experience. Super Mario Bros. 3 is pushing it, but at least it’s made to be pushed through at a sitting. It’s dynamic, momentum based. Keep moving, changing.

Memory cards, and to a lesser extent their battery-based predecessors, are possibly the worst thing ever to happen to console games. If you want to trace the downward trajectory of design versus rote content addiction, it begins here. We lost all focus once we could save our progress.

I abhor the mentality that we’ve all silently grown into that games are meant to be “finished” then put on the shelf and never played again. No rule is absolute, but that’s basically the point. Expansiveness isn’t linear progress; it’s an accessory to design that has specific uses. Does the nuance of Metal Gear Solid 3‘s discussion justify its length and complexity? Almost certainly yes. Does Sonic 3&K‘s? Probably not. What’s the point of scale when the game never uses that space to say anything novel, and half of the “content” is trash?

The issue at hand is context. For a game based so intrinsically on forward momentum, does it suit that remit to so sprawl? I’m not going to pretend that the roller coaster streamlining of Sonic 2 is ideal, compared to the more measured study of the original Sonic, but it shows what I mean. Underneath whatever variation of (the side scrolling iteration of) Sonic is this set of physics that demands the player to Get It Done; Keep Moving.

When the game gets in the way of Getting It Done, this is a pronounced conflict, best used to draw intentional dissonance with the player. When that dissonance is unguided or misguided, it gets in the way of the game’s essential grammar and message in an infuriating capacity.

This dissonance is a reason that so many people dismiss Sonic 1. No spin-dash! [The slow-moving] Marble Zone! You don’t just keep holding right all the time! Blah! This reaction, though, I submit is a result of a retrospective misreading of the game’s grammar and message, based on a priori assumption. The portions of Sonic the Hedgehog where you aren’t just holding right aren’t examples of broken or misguided design; they serve a purpose. They serve both to establish a broader sense of grammar, causality, and purpose and to underline the moments of speed with significance.

Without a low (or at least a medium), any highs are rendered meaningless. Over years of Pavlovian garbage, Gamers now expect nothing but high. Not only that; thanks to memory cards and decades of rote remakes, they expect lots of it, and never to have to repeat it quite verbatim. We’ll never play this level again, so let’s have twenty more that repeat its basic ideas, so we can say we’ve had our full. Then sequels! And of course we have to save our place, lest we lose our progress and have to play those tedious levels all over again! Heavens! We can’t possibly lose anything, or we’re being treated unfairly. We need more, more more. But — nothing too different, or because we only want this one specific thing.

After 20 years, okay, another major 2D Sonic is probably warranted. Good-O. It’s not like we’re talking a yearly EA franchise update. But. To do this demands that one go back and deconstruct the grammar and messaging: how does how the game say things affect what the game says?

Pac-Man CE is a brilliant deconstruction/refinement of the basic concepts of Pac-Man, cutting out the parts that distract from its message. Sonic 2 is not quite as brilliant, as it just abjectly chops out or papers over the portions of its predecessor that don’t involve zoom-zoom — which makes burn-out a real thing, as the dialogue is nothing but one-dimensional peak messaging for way, way too long. Holding right on a D-pad isn’t interesting in and of itself.

Sonic 3&K gets around this slightly by introducing much bigger levels with different kinds of blockades — so you have to press other buttons besides just right — then mixes its messages, creating a new type of unpleasant dissonance, by timing the maze. (Granted, the levels in Sonic 3 are more considered than the garbage in its content patch (Mushroom Hill can go pleasure itself fungally).)

Point being, if you’re gonna revisit a 25-year-old legacy, there’s a certain remit to plumb deep and try to rediscover its essence. To wit: Gradius V, which, oh my God, finally nails what makes Gradius what it is, and builds a whole game around exploring the consequences of that notion.

This Sonic Mania thing is full of fan service, which is fine, if you’re really into Moia, as it were. The announced scale gives me pause, though. Bigger ain’t better. It can be a neutral quality that supports a justified discussion. But, if it’s huge just to be huge… then, oh dear. When you combine this intended scale with the admitted glory of fan service that seems to make up the game’s fabric, it sounds worrisome.

What is the justification for the scale? What is it doing that demands the player keep trudging forward, saving progress, continuing later? Does it just serve to eat up the player’s time, so that it can put a number on the back of the hypothetical box next to play value? Because, and this is key to the whole relationship between a game and its player, I have a life. Being is time, you know. If something is going to eat up what precious life I have to give it, it had better have a reason. It had better give me some kind of insight, or at least unburdened joy, that makes me measurably better off than I was before I played it.

Each time I play Tetris, or even a short epic like Metroid II, I gain something. I’ve been down this road, but it’s a rich and subtle journey. The journey doesn’t demand so much from me that the burden of embarking it outweighs what fresh nuances it has to impart on a review. I come out rewarded.

A game like Sonic 3 & Knuckles asks that I give it measurably more than it has to offer me. It does give a me negative inspiration — “Don’t Do This” — but it’s not thoughtful enough to use its time effectively. It doesn’t really question its premises and bring them to a logical set of conclusions. There’s not much questioning going on at all, which is, I think, most of my point. The design here is less art; more a matter of rote craft and capitulation.

If the game were to use that space to dwell on the sort of progress that defines a Sonic game and give time for thought, well, okay then! Sonic Adventure justifies its scope for reasons similar to this. It goes to such lengths to dwell on the elements that make up the series. When you’re looking at the motivation that drives the characters and the way all of their perspectives interlock, this is heavy stuff. If there were more meaningful interplay amongst the characters in Sonic 3, and that interplay were reflected in its design, then okay. Scale.

Mind you, I’m not saying that “story” in and of itself is a necessary prerequisite. That’s just one example of a possible justification. If a game is to go deep in exploring the expressive and logical consequences of Sonic the Hedgehog‘s underling assumptions, then take the space you need. I’m not working on a faith that this is why the new game is to sprawl, though, precisely because of how Sonic 3&K is used as a reference point.

If you’re just going to go through the motions of iteration, keep the length to what that iteration can support without overly burdening me.

(And, this is why I can’t ever play videogames anymore. I take them way more seriously than is warranted.)

Addendum:

Incidentally, Sonic 3&K actually has 26 levels, not including special stages or multi-player stage. Ergo it is, to use the original power’s words, “tiresome and boring.” The original Sonic? It has 18 main levels, plus Final Zone [the final showdown area] and all of six special zones. By the poster’s standard (an ideal of 16 levels), it’s much closer to an ideal length! If we were to chop out those unnecessary third acts (which Scrap Brain bulks out by repeating a Labyrinth level), it’d be twelve, plus the special zones. Even better!

Sonic 2 has 20 main levels (plus a few extra in the mobile remake) — with, importantly for this discussion, far less variety. This is the poster’s litmus for too many, and exhaustion.

Sonic CD? If we take into account the past, present, future, and bad future variations of each stage, that gives us SEVENTY barely-differentiated levels. (You may well guess how much I enjoy Sonic CD. The answer lies not in the number alone, but the “barely-differentiated” plus the number.)

Regeneration Nation

  • Reading time:5 mins read

So, a new regeneration. For those new to the process, this raises questions about the nature of the thing and whether the Doctor is in a privileged class among his people to be able to make use of this gift.

The spin-offs make a feast of Time Lord continuity. From the Master’s real name to that Loom business, ask any wilderness era fan about Gallifrey and instantly regret it as they regale you with the differences between a Gallifreyan and a Time Lord, the particulars of Time Lord biology and society, and the workings of their educational systems.

On TV, there’s nothing very conclusive — though there is a suggestion, which you can see in recent episodes such as “Listen” and “Hell Bent”, that there’s an extreme class system on Gallifrey, and that only the very privileged families are enrolled in the academies to become Time Lords proper.

That said, what is a Time Lord exactly? Nearly every on-screen reference suggests it’s the Doctor’s species (e.g., “The End of the World”), but that may just be shorthand for Gallifreyans in much the same way that, depending on who’s talking, “Yankee” can mean an American, a Northerner, a Northeasterner, a New Englander, someone from Vermont, or someone who eats pie with cheese on it.

The two episodes I reference above make for an interesting puzzle, as “Listen” suggests a difference between those who go into the military and those who go to school to become Time Lords — and yet as we see, Gallifreyan military figures also have regenerative capabilities.

Ignoring everything but what we actually see on the show, it may be as easy as projecting the class system to its logical conclusion. Everyone living on Gallifrey is a time lord, but only those enrolled in the Academy become Time Lords. Everyone is of the same species, and therefore has the same biology and theoretical potential, but those who go through the Academy learn some deep and fundamental lessons about themselves and their relationship with time (starting with the Untempered Schism) that give them more access to their inborn abilities — not altogether unlike attending a Tibetan monastery, as I’m sure Barry Letts would passionately have suggested. (See Planet of Spiders.)

The Doctor, being the Doctor, was not a good student. Ergo, his command over his higher biological and metaphysical functions is… lacking, compared to many of his peers. He attended Academy, yet shares more of a mind with the peasants left to scrape for subsistence in the wastes outside the Citadel.

There may be more of a reason to that than we know, as suggested in many places (e.g., “Listen”). There seems a strong suggestion that he came from a disadvantaged background, and only made it into the Academy and the associated high society through some kind of luck.

There’s no real reason to think this, aside from filling in the blanks the TV show provides, but it sounds to me like the Doctor and whatever family he might have had were somehow affiliated with the Master’s family. The Master speaks of his father’s estates, and how he and the Doctor used to run around them as children — but there’s no suggestion of wealth or privilege or family significance to the Doctor, aside from the fact of his having attended the Academy. It really gives a sense that the Master was a spoiled upper-class kid, the kind who would torture small animals, and the Doctor was the servant’s kid who, lacking any other friends, the Master took to as an assumed minion. It may well have been that association, possibly a good note from the Master’s family, that got the Doctor into the Academy to start with.

This may go some distance to explain the Doctor’s fondness for humans. He’s a time lord who may well be from an unprivileged background and, though he was “elevated” to the upper class, never fit in and still thinks of himself as one of the people.

Hartnell’s Doctor, being a recent emigrant (shall we say) when we meet him, may well still be wearing decades of this high-handed shell he was forced to adopt. It may only be after several beat-downs from Barbara that he starts to remember himself, and to allow those centuries of pretense to melt away.

For all we know from the TV show, it may be entirely possible for every person on Gallifrey to regenerate. They seem to all be time lords, with a small “t” and “l”, even if the peasants/Shabogans are barely considered people by the upper classes. They may not have the same command as the highly-trained gentry over things like regeneration and time sensitivity. It may be more hit-and-miss for them if it in fact happens at all. There may be urban — well, rural — legends of elders who regenerated hundreds of times, while others may only have one regeneration if any. Maybe the whole point of the Untempered Schism is to stabilize and regulate that business. Who knows.

But, there are lots of spaces in here to speculate. Which is, let’s be honest, a big part of the fun to a show like Doctor Who.