We All Fall Down

Half-Human On His Superego’s Side

  • Reading time:8 mins read

Regarding the Valeyard, he makes a little more sense if you recall Planet of Spiders and Logopolis. (And just perhaps Destiny of the Daleks, while we’re at it.)

Recall that Time Lords can, as they near regeneration, sometimes project a corporeal future image of themselves, who will then assist in their regeneration.

Cho-Je is an independent, self-aware projection of the future incarnation of K’anpo. He exists to help K’anpo when he regenerates into the incarnation resembling Cho-Je.

The Watcher is essentially the Four-and-a-Halfth Doctor; a projection of the Doctor from halfway through his next regeneration process. He has been projected backward to help the Fourth Doctor regenerate into the Fifth, by merging with the Fourth Doctor.

By a similar logic, the Valeyard is a projection of the Doctor from somewhere in the middle of his final regeneration — except this projection has [artificially] taken on all of the bad qualities of the Doctor, and has developed its own ideas. Rather than assist his earlier self, this projection means to manipulate the Doctor in order to ensure that he becomes concrete, and real. You could say that the Valeyard is basically a Dark Watcher.

Which is a rather interesting concept. It’s just… very convoluted and strange, and it requires that you embrace the projection business, which is weird to start with.

Curiously, the Master was originally a similar concept: in Pertwee’s final serial, he was to be revealed as a projection of the Doctor’s id, who ultimately would sacrifice himself to allow the Third Doctor to regenerate. Delgado’s death prevented that plot thread from resolving itself, which has led the Master down a very different charater path. Yet thematically it still kind of ties into the discussion below.

This is all the more interesting when you add it to something I posted somewhere else, in regard to “The Forest of Death”.

This is just my reading, but it seems to me there’s an impossible sort of shame attached to the Doctor’s name. Like he did something horrible at one point, and now that name is pariah. So he took a new name, as a mask. And the new name came to define who he wanted to be, whereas the original name threatened to define who he was by virtue of who he had been and done.

I guess sort of like Human Nature. You could say that same psychology trickled up into John Smith.

If that’s what happened, I wonder if the Master was involved somehow… It sounds like Davies was implying they chose their names for similar reasons, at around the same time.

On further thought, this would explain a lot of things about the Doctor. Why he does wear this mask all the time. Why he seems so committed to righting things, even sometimes against reason. It’s as if he’s trying to redeem himself. There’s his exile, and the Time Lords’ particular suspicion of him — which seems to go beyond mere bureaucracy. The early, “bastard Hartnell” fits in pretty well.

And then there’s all that business about the Doctor’s personality being mostly a facade, that he puts on to impress others. As Moffat says, “He’s almost a charlatan… in a good way. He poses as this god-like figure, but he’s just a bloke under there.”

Shadows of the Past

So… extrapolating a bit, perhaps the Doctor and the Master were both involved in something rather horrible. They were both a little bad. As established, the Doctor was always an outsider, always rejected, always looking for meaning in his life. That can lead to all kinds of delinquency. The Master was worse, he probably was a little older, and helped to goad on the Doctor. Whatever they did, they became persona non grata to Time Lord society. The Master, having been more directly responsible, may have been more severely punished. The Doctor more or less “got away” with what they’d done, yet was shamed by his actions and marked as a renegade.

Their names went down in infamy, and effectively came to define who they were. So each took a new name. The Master was fueled by contempt; the Doctor was fueled by regret. Despite efforts and the change of name, there was no more place for the Doctor on Gallifrey — so he decided to steal an old, broken down time capsule that no one wanted — rather like himself — and go out into the wild, perhaps to find a new direction for himself. To escape, and to find himself some meaning.

He was still a bit of a nasty item, of course. Just being a Time Lord, being raised in their society, probably didn’t help. And then there were his friends… Yet being the best of bad company is still a relative thing. His granddaughter — whenever it was she came into the picture — was some voice of conscience, of course, yet she was young and naive and easy to ignore. Easy to manipulate, as the Doctor, like his friend the Master, was so adept at doing.

Then he was forced down off his pedestal, and began to interact with “lower” people, like Ian and Barbara. And gradually he found a new moral compass and meaning. And he began to remold himself. To become The Doctor, as it were. Though he knows full well that it’s mostly an act.

He really does mean well, and he really does try — yet there’s a reason for that. He’s fighting against something. Against the person who he might be, who he once nearly was before he was humanized (as it were). He takes on all of these human, very mortal companions, who take him at face value, reminding him that what matters is not who he is, it’s what he does. And who can stop him, if need be. Yet the memories of Time Lords are long.

You can see it in how defiant the Second Doctor is at trial, at how desperate he is to justify himself and his attempts to do what he considers right. All the Time Lords see is the Doctor breaking their laws again; they take some effort to convince of his sincerity. Was he really acting in good faith?

Shadows of the Future

Going with Barry Letts’ Freudian model, you could say that before he met Ian and Barbara, the Doctor was essentially a balance between an ego and an id, with the Master prodding on his worse side. Who cares about practicality: think of what you can do! Interacting with humanity imparted him with an overwhelming superego, which tipped the balance of his psyche. And it is that which has been dominant ever since.

Which is where the Valeyard comes in. All of that potential for wrong, buried and suppressed for twelve generations, that very real core to the Doctor’s personality, his burning id — and this is its last chance to assert itself, and paradoxically claim the Doctor’s future generations, and a dominant personality. The last chance for the Doctor to be who he might be, who he fears he always has been behind all the facade. The person who the Master saw in the Doctor so long ago, when they were such close friends.

It also seems to explain the Master’s resentment toward the Doctor. Beyond anything specific he might blame on the Doctor, you always get the sense that he feels somehow rejected. And in a sense, that’s exactly right. Although there is still some affection at the core of their relationship, the Doctor found his own compass, and doesn’t need the Master anymore — which only makes the Master all the more bitter, and amplifies all the feelings of despair that the Doctor has learned to fight against.

And then there’s his apparent responsibility for the loss of the Time Lords. All that time trying to redeem himself… and that’s where he ended up? That’s the decision he was forced to make? No wonder he’s so suicidal recently.

This is all just me, of course. Still, wouldn’t it be interesting to start to wrap things up around the Twelfth and Thirteenth Doctors? To bring all that had happened into a grander context? All this certainly ties in with the themes of the show. As I said a while back,

It’s about a man who looks human but isn’t, traveling through time and space in a ship that looks like a police phone booth but isn’t. The title is the show’s central question: who is this guy, anyway? Hints have trickled out over the show’s forty-some years, but they generally just raise more questions.

As he explores, the Doctor recruits traveling companions — usually pretty young women from modern London — and tries to show them the universe. Instead, he tends to stumble into crises that he feels obliged to put right, using little but his wits and a startling audacity. Then he takes right off again, always moving.

The point of the show is that what matters is not who or what a person is; it’s what he does right now, and how he does it. With enough curiosity and persistence, even a nobody can change the world. Yet to find that wonder, and become more than you seem, you must leave your comfort zone.

And what a story it could be… if it just had two more points: a pivot, and an end.

4.09

  • Reading time:2 mins read

“I have the two qualities you require to see absolute truth. I am brilliant, and unloved”

That goes well with:

“I like old places. They make me sad.”
“What’s good about sad?”
“Sad is happy, for deep people.”

You know that early X-Files episode, called something like “Darkness Falls”? The one about the man-eating tree mites that live in the darkness — as it turns out, released when people cut down old-growth forest?

…

In other news, in the commentary, Davies, Moffat, and Tennant discuss at length the issue that the Doctor is in fact both written and performed as if he’s putting on a facade. Everything that he does is intended to be just a little disingenuous.

Which is interesting, as largely Eccleston at least tried to play the character “for real”. That sincerity is the fascinating thing about his Doctor.

They also talk about Troughton’s sending up his own performance in his later appearances, and how when he was in the role he was actually a bit scary. Really, they discuss a lot of interesting things.

I wasn’t absolutely convinced by last week’s episode. The conclusion is good, though. I could probably pick at a few things, but I’m not motivated. It is indeed packed full of self-consciously “cool stuff” — like the snapping. Dear Lord, is that ever exhibit A. Unlike Lawrence Miles, this does not bother me. Rather, it fills me with a Davies-like glee. I’m a sucker for self-conscious structural shenanigans, though.

Blaring Orchestra in the Library

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Why is it that, in Doctor Who, emergency messages are always repeated over and over and over, in the same tone? It seems to happen every other episode. Combine it with “HEY WHO TURNED OUT THE LIGHT?!” and a cliffhanger, and it’s like that scene in Transformers the Movie where Wheelie and the Dinobots get into a debate.

Speaking of audio, I realize that Murray Gold often gets flak for his bombastic scores; this, however, is the first time he has annoyed me in particular. The scene with the TV — man, that’s some intense channel flipping there. Well, sort of. Whereas as written and shot the scene is a bit of a “Wait, what was that all about?” moment, the music is screaming “OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!!!1“. Really, silence or a quiet, confused theme — music box, perhaps; he’s put it to good use elsewhere — would have been plenty peachy.

This episode is full of tiny, unimportant annoyances — irritable motes* — more so than in any Moffat episode yet, few of them of Moffat’s own doing. Even the interminable “first woman down” scene was largely an afterthought of Lyn’s. The commentary is a bit awkward and strange to listen to; basically the gist is that neither Collinson nor Lyn really “gets” what Moffat is doing, as a writer (Lyn asked Collinson what he thought distinguished a Moffat episode from a Davies one, and Collinson was completely stumped; “maybe they’re a bit faster?” he suggested), so they kept deviating in arbitrary directions, occasionally knocking over all the carefully landsaped hedges around Moffat’s path, whenever they hit a strange obstacle.

I wonder what the… face-node things would have looked like, by Moffat’s original design.

Whereas Lyn may have artsy ambitions, and he may have directed a couple of great episodes, I often feel like the episodes he directs work more in spite of his choices than because of them. Mind, he’s nowhere near as bad as Matt Jones or Colin Teague. I just get the impression that most of his reputation amongst fans comes from the rather gorgeous set design and lighting in “The Unquiet Dead”. Which… weren’t really his responsibility. And God, was that a boring episode.

Well. Production problems aside, here we have yet another Moffat episode that plays up the duality between the “reality” of the audience / an observer — for whom the Doctor is a secret, special object of apparent fantasy — and the “real world” of the Doctor’s, that starts to overflow from the audience’s fantasy into its real life. In other words, the fairy tale / audience / myth business again.

It’s this thing he does (as does Davies, sometimes, a little differently), where the show is more clearly laid out as a fiction, as having a fictional relationship with the audience — yet there’s that suggestion that the lines between fiction and fact are not so solid as one might be taught to understand. The implication being that in a sense, if you believe deeply enough, the Doctor is real — as real as the monsters under your bed or phone calls in the night, shadows, statues, blinking. All primal stuff, imbued with a new nervous energy and linked back to the show, firing the imagination, asking people to look beneath the surface of their world.

“The Girl in the Fireplace” is basically a manifesto for this view of the show — this fantastic intimacy.

“What do monsters have nightmares about?” “Me!”
“The monsters and the Doctor. It seems one cannot have one without the other.”
“Stranger? I’ve known you my whole life.”

It’s pretty great.

His only story so far that hasn’t overtly done this is “The Empty Child”. I’m wondering if this fairy tale business — which is, as far as I’m concerned, the proper way to frame the show — will take priority in two years’ time. If so, that explains why he may or may not have (i.e., has) invited Gaiman to participate.

Not entirely successful. Pretty good, though. And full of rampant implication, as it should be.

*: Vashta Nerada yourself. That name, incidentally, sounds like a term I would have made up in high school. For an AD&D campaign. 2nd Edition, of course.

EDIT: And there Moffat is on Confidential: “What works for Doctor Who is you take things from the real world and you twist them a bit. It’s like a fairy tale in that sense. Not.. I, I don’t mean a fairy tale in the sense of something sort of light and fluffy; I mean a fairy tale in the sense of something twisted and dark. […] Putting monsters in the safety of the home is Doctor Who’s mission statement.”

Comp copies — what a revelation

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Hey, a couple of the games I’ve worked on are out now.

Lost Empire is a grandiose space strategy thing. I rewrote most of the game text and the manual on a short timescale.
Penumbra is a… I’m not sure. I haven’t played it. Some kind of first-person Lovecraftian survival horror thing. I rewrote the manual, and I think some of the game text. Hard to remember everything I do; this was months ago.

Though I have no comment on the games themselves, I rather like their packaging. Nice, big no-nonsense logos. Understated cover art.

To note, there’s a silly typo on the back of the Lost Empires box. That’s not my fault; they didn’t run that text past me.

EDIT: Speaking of typos… I feel I must have rewritten the text in that Lost Empire trailer, yet those punctuation errors can’t be my own. So I’m not sure what’s going on there. Maybe they used an earlier draft? Maybe I never touched that after all?

With Teeth

  • Reading time:12 mins read

It’s not the most popular of his albums, but lately I’m finding that I enjoy it the best of the bunch. Though, uh. Taking a closer look at the lyrics… well, it’s interesting that this would be the case.

As grasping and inelegant as Trent Reznor usually is, somehow there’s usually a parallel between what he’s going through and where I am in my own life. Which may explain why I have such trouble listening to his stuff that came out when I was in high school. Anyway, there’s a sincerity that makes up for the clumsiness. And he is getting better at expressing himself.

Note that “The Hand that Feeds” is about George Bush, and as such it’s… a little out-of-place.

Incidentally, it’s out today.

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I was invited to the launch party for Star Soldier R, a couple of days ago, in an informal capacity. It was pretty great, actually. I sat and chatted with the new president of Hudson USA, whose name escapes me, for quite a while. And the game is pretty good, for what it is — which is a sort of score attack thing, not unlike Pac-Man CE. I asked, in all fatuousness, if it came with one of those Takahashi Meijin tap-timing controllers — and… it sort of does, in that there’s a special game mode for that.

Eventually there was a competition for the highest score in 2-minute mode — and I came in second place! That’s out of the few-dozen people there. Maybe thirty, forty, fifty people? The guy ahead of me chose, as his prize, a six-month supply of beef. Which I’m sure he will enjoy! I chose six months of coffee, and the third-place winner (whom I sort of know) was left with a supply of barbecue sauce.

It’s a good thing that I recently began to drink coffee — if irregularly.

As we left, everyone was expected to take a gift bag; as many did not, I found an extra one ceremoniously shoved into my hand, meaning that I also wound up with an extensive cache of wine, cookies, and chocolate.

All in all, a profitable evening.

Now I’m Down In It

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Amandeep: wait so
isn’t “kinda i want to” sort of uh
specifically about being gay
Me: Is it?
Amandeep: this just occurred to me
Me: Wait, let me take a look at this.
Amandeep: i’m not sure of what i should do.
when every thought i’m thinking of is you.
all of my excuses turn to lies.
maybe God will cover up his eyes
Me: Okay. Yeah, there’s some ambiguity about the pronouns and the exact naure of his transgression.
The simplest reading is… well, it’s an early version of Closer.
Actually.
From across the way?
Is he some kind of weird Rear Window stalker?
Amandeep: i mean, the thing is that there are all these weird FORBIDDEN LOVE kind of overtones
Me: Sitting alone in his apartment, lusting after some woman across the way?
It’s really ambiguous.
Amandeep: actually
this could be from the perspective of like
a rapist or something
Me: Yeah.
Amandeep: which is a much creepier reading
but seems equally valid
Me: Stalker-rapist.
Amandeep: what’s the price i pay.
i don’t care what they say.
i want to.
Me: Man.
Yeah.
I actually like that interpretation.
Though the gay one is interesting.
This is such an open-ended song.
“I want to do something transgressive! And I feel ambivalent about that!”
So many possibilities!
Amandeep: hahaha
“I want to do something transgressive! And I feel ambivalent about that!”
Me: So let’s assume the stalker-rapist interpretation for the moment.
Me: Now consider the early version of the song.
Amandeep: yeah
Sent at 4:40 PM on Thursday
Me: That’s kind of a brilliant combination.
I’m going to just assume that’s what the song is about, specifically because that’s the original arrangement.

The Soul Patch of Ire

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So I’ve rambled about the Sontarans, and how essentially uninteresting they are as they have been portrayed and used: yet another proud warrior race, which, aside from being familiar and trite, means they’re rational and focused and therefore no particular threat unless you’re distinctly in their way — and even if you are, you just may be able to talk your way out of harm. Furthermore, they have usually only appeared one or two at a time, leaving them to waddle around in the place of any other generic monster. Not too effective!

Leaving aside the cosmetic update, which is half brilliant (the prosthetics) and half ridiculous (the suit), the new series team has done two things with the Sontarans, at least one of which should have happened thirty-some years ago. First, they’ve finally taken narrative and thematic advantage of the Sontarans’ nature as clones — which has, to date, mostly been background detail. This is a wealthy area to explore, and I’m really curious where they’ll go with it next week, up through episode thirteen. Second, and more immediately significant, is the adaptation of their “proud warrior code” into a relatable emotional threat.

It’s subtle; they’re not playing it up too much. Yet the Sontarans have been rejigged from their status as basically ineffectual boogiemen to fit alongside the Slitheen and the Daleks as somewhat ridiculous, somewhat imposing, altogether unreasonable adult figures. Where the Daleks represent wrath and the Slitheen, hypocrisy, the Sontarans are now spun as manipulative “tough love” paternal figures, full of their own unpleasant martial codes through which they measure everything and everyone. If you can adapt and get into their graces, which generally involves behaving in ways that don’t feel very comfortable, you’re all right. You get a certain amount of praise and appreciation. If you can’t do that or you can’t maintain it, though, you get stomped all over — and they try to tell you that it’s your own fault, for having failed them. For being weak. For somehow just not being good enough.

The point is driven home by the irritating “teen genius” in this week’s episode, who serves basically as the smug over-achieving suck-up that everyone hates, and everyone is measured against. “Why can’t you be more like Luke? Luke never fails me.” What Luke doesn’t realize in his smugness, of course, is that he’s just a tool for someone else’s ego and sense of righteousness. And the moment he stops serving his purpose, whether through his own doing or otherwise, he’s in for a huge fall.

It’s not as visceral a threat as some of the other adversaries, yet it is poignant. Combine it with the clone theme, and the Sontarans are suddenly a rather complex and nuanced device.

Incredulity as Metanarrative Itself

  • Reading time:5 mins read

I find it bizarre that people often describe the original series of Doctor Who as more sophisticated than the new one. For its time, depending on exactly what we’re talking about, perhaps there’s an argument. Yet TV writing has come a long way in the last twenty years, and the new series is right up there. Thematically, in terms of narrative and metanarrative and characterization, the new series is at times some of the most sophisticated stuff currently on TV. Especially Davies’ episodes.

As great as it can be at times and for its time (some of the Hartnell era and season seven in particular), the classic series rarely aspires to more than pulp and generally only transcends that through sheer force of good nature. What themes are there tend to be pretty much on the surface, or else rather clumsy and obvious. (See The Green Death, which is held up as a beacon of subtext.) In varying quantities, and again qualified by the standards of TV writing of the time, you can make some good arguments for parts of the Hartnell, Pertwee, and McCoy eras. I’m really not sure what hidden insights you might find in Fury of the Deep, however.

Not that this is a negative in its own right; something doesn’t have to be great literature to be entertaining, and the original series has charm by the bucketload. Usually. Whenever Philip Martin isn’t involved. Further, it’s senseless to criticize a thing for failing to succeed at that which it never even intends to do, especially if its ambition is respectable enough for its context. Yet, there we are. Different ambitions at play. And on a narrative level, the new series is, broadly speaking, both way more ambitious and far more sophisticated, as in part dictated by the different climate in which it’s being made.

Granted, most of the new series episodes not written by Davies or Moffat are also a bit skint on subtext that’s not so blunt it might as well be supertext. Scrolling, blinking captions, at the bottom of the screen. Sometimes they’re a bit skint on text, even. Even Cornell, as great as his stuff is on first viewing, has very little going on under the surface. I was a bit surprised that I still enjoyed “The Fires of Pompeii” after a couple of further viewings, and found some new things to focus on; it seemed like it might have blown its load (no pun intended) on the first impression, rather like “School Reunion” or “The Shakespeare Code”. Still, Davies forms the template. And Moffat plays along, as he simultaneously does his own thing.

One of the big dividing factors is that the new series has an overarching philosophy and message to it, instantiated, challenged, and developed to varying degrees in at least most “key” episodes — that being a postmodern, essentially atheistic critique of modern cultural tropes, weighed against a devout sense of humanism.

Taken from Wikipedia, Jean-François Lyotard wrote: Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements–narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?

Emphasis added. If there is one overt defining feature of the new series — one that annoys the hell out of some classic series fans (perhaps understandably, since the bulk of the “classic” series, especially in the more popular eras, does little but revel in metanarrative for its own sake, understandable itself for the context in which it was produced) is utter irreverence toward metanarrative, at times bordering on contempt. Thus, the “overuse” of the sonic screwdriver and psychic paper, flippant get-out-of-jail-free plot cheats like the cliffhanger non-resolution at the start of “The Sound of Drums”, and fast-forward exposition as at the start of “Rose”. Plus, you know, the lack of plot — plot being one of the huge metanarrative structures that has, as an institution, gone beyond its functional purpose for organizing the crucial subjective elements of story (themes and character development) into the sort of tool fetishism that makes contemporary videogames so very boring.

What Davies has done that is clever on more than one level is that he has taken the incredulous structure of a postmodern approach, and with all the faith in the world anchored it with the one thing that he feels the most strongly about, and that he clearly feels defines Doctor Who as a narrative: an utter faith in humanity to find its way, at the end of the day, provided just enough of a window to see outside itself and its own petty momentary neuroses.

Of course, people are fragile and imperfect and there will always be a battle. The stupid apes need to be challenged, and that’s what the Doctor is for. (Of course, in this version of the show the Doctor equally well needs to be challenged, and that’s what humanity is for.) Yet given that opportunity, they are full of such potential. All it takes is a bit of insight and a bit of motivation, and you can break out of all the structures and guidelines that you think define your life (the postmodern part), and change the world. Or at least your own personal world.

And for a show fundamentally aimed at kids, this is a pretty amazing message to spin.

Grit

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Why does every single thing filmed in the 1970s look like it belongs in a horror movie?

NORMAL GAME NORMAL MODE

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Hey, the Xbox version of Ikaruga has the poetry in it — translated, even! Mind, it flashes by too quickly to read. Still, hey! It’s complete!

Except for the neat slow-mo walking dude menus in the Dreamcast version. Those are gone.

Nasty, British, and Short

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Following up a bit on an earlier entry:

The Sontarans are your generic Proud Warrior Race. Except they look like potatoes, which is a little different. Really, they’re nothing interesting. Just interplanetary thugs. Nevertheless (presumably because of fandom’s Bob Holmes fetish) they hold one of the high chairs in the Doctor Who rogues gallery.

This is weird, since even in a plot sense (never mind a psychological one) they pose little fundamental threat. They’re focused on their own agenda, which may or may involve the protagonists or anything that matters to them. Furthermore, however narrow they are, Sontarans are rational beings — so in theory, a clever person might persuade them into some alternative plan of action. Any peril, then, is contextual, and tends to amount to “danger of being shot, maybe, if you’re unlucky enough to be in the way and someone is feeling grumpy”.

The only pregnant thing (pun intended) about the creatures is the thematic issue that, in theory, they are all clones. (In practice, no two have looked remotely alike; chalk that up to the costume department.) Though it’s hardly a novel subject, that’s maybe got some story potential — yet to date it’s just background detail, as is everything else about them, except that they like to stomp around and shoot ray guns at our heroes. Sometimes.

For a year now fans have whined about the Judoon, claiming they’re just lame rip-offs of the Sontarans. If anything, though, the Judoon hold more story potential, in that as police-for-hire they represent a more usefully gray area, and that their extraordinarily procedural minds can lead to some amusing behavior and twists of logic. Plus, what a great prosthetic! Though in some ways they do fill the Sontarans’ practical role, they do it far more successfully (and more originally), following their orders (for good or ill) in a ridiculously literal manner. Lots you can do with that!

Again, if a new series writer were to go into the cloning business, maybe there would be a bit of a point to the Sontarans. Otherwise, I’m not sure why they need to be explored. (My guess: that’s just what’s going to happen this year. We shall see!)

The Remake of Samus

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Someone put a lot of effort into addressing the common complaint that the entire Metroid series isn’t exactly like Super Metroid, with different maps.

You know what a Metroid II remake would really need? Complex lighting. And lack thereof.

Lack of ambient lighting, a lot of the time. You’d get some from lava, from certain bioluminescent materials, and whatnot. Maybe some areas would be brightly lit. Mostly, though, and at times exclusively, you’d be relying on a certain tapering bubble of light around Samus. Outside of that you’d get a vague hint of shapes and motion. This would also give the game a somewhat monochrome appearance.

Maybe the more injured Samus is, the smaller the window or the dimmer the light, or the more flickery.

Heck, maybe phaser shots would set things on fire, creating light and attracting/distracting certain monsters.

Maybe, instead of a map, a way of marking the terrain. So you’d know if you’d been somewhere. Like, if the spider ball were to leave a faint residue behind…

Shepard: You could even have upgrades that enhance how much light Samus gives off, as an extra bonus.
Like maybe your gun shots are a little more sparkly now.

Me: I can see an argument for adding the charge shot.
Just hold the charge to light the room, pretty much.

Shepard: Try to tune it so that Samus’s ambient light increases as the environmental light decreases.
So at the beginning you’ve got all these fungi and lava pits and glowbugs.
And by the end it’s just… a dead pit.
Maybe the occasional nigh-dead Chozo lamp.

Me: I like how a lot of the natural lighting will be a deep, threatening red.
From all the lava.

Shepard: Mmm.

Me: A lot of the game, where there’s color, it will seem tinted.
Oh heck. And light would generally just show the surface of things. So outside a certain number of pixels (one “block” or so), walls would be flat black.

Shepard: Yeah.

Me: A narrow, well-lit corridor would still leave half the screen dark.
Creating a sort of letterboxed, managed feeling to the space.

Shepard: I wonder how that would look if you had the rare, fully-lit-even-penetrating-the-tiles room, for Chozo Artifact rooms.
I get the feeling players would want to just chill out in those rooms.

Me: That would seem comparably tranquil, wouldn’t it. especially if the light were to have a sort of ethereal, light blue cast to it.

Me: I want to play this now.
Heck, this sounds closer to what Metroid should be doing in general.

Shepard: It is warm inside the power suit.
Everywhere else is cold.

Me: The third game set too much of a template for laying everything out in front of you like a videogame. Here’s this kind of tile, which needs this kind of key to break. You need this to get through here. Everything laid out clearly; you just have to go through the motions. All very rational. Of course, it’s a lot less obnoxious about this than other games that followed (and preceded it). Still, Metroid shouldn’t be an action puzzle game. It’s supposed to be mysterious, oppressive, anxious, and a little wonderful.
The first two games have this.
Fusion does, a little, in its completely different way.
Prime does, pretty much. The first one.

Shepard: It turned “do it because I said so” into the actual story.

To add to earlier ideas: surfaces glisten. So (depending on the potency of a light source and the reflectivity of a material) to things just outside the range of full lighting, you’d still get some faint one-pixel-wide reflection off any surface parallel to the light source, partially outlining an otherwise black mass. Which would be incredible if there were several living things around the edges of the screen.

Combine this with the business about spider balls leaving residue, and there’s a lot of complex stuff going on with edges.

Maybe an infrared visor upgrade, that you can toggle. Danger of flaring sometimes, especially when you’re shooting. When exploring and travelling, generally speeds things up.

On Monsters

  • Reading time:5 mins read

A good monster isn’t just a neat design and a memorable catch phrase; it taps into some deep and basic human anxiety and makes it animate. This is the nature of horror. The Daleks do this; the Cybermen do this.

The Master, as a villain, works dramatically because of his classic archetype: he’s just like the hero, except bad. He just serves to make the audience hate him, out of loyalty to the protagonist. Which is a strong way to go. Anger is just as good as fear.

Out of the new series, the Slitheen probably come the closest to something significant, in a children’s book sense: the idea of adults (especially petty, hypocritical adults) being ridiculous, childish monsters in disguise. Which children all know anyway, but here it is, made real! On that note…

Regarding Daleks

What makes Daleks work is that they embody more than pure nastiness. They’re pure, shrill, unreasonable nastiness. In theory at least, there’s no arguing with a Dalek; there’s no chance of discussion, no chance of compassion. They simply out-and-out hate you for the fact of being you. Whoever and whatever you are, if they get the notion and the chance, they will kill you out of that blind rage just because they can. And there’s very little stopping them.

This is the substance of many of my nightmares: accidentally crossing someone threatening, then doing everything I can to ease the situation, yet everything I say or do just digs me in deeper, makes the threatening person angrier, more violent, more crazed. And there’s nothing I can do to escape or halt the fury. This feeling is something that children, in particular, should understand well. Both the Slitheen and the Daleks call on senses of adults and authority at their worst; they just take different routes to a similar point.

Of course in execution they’re both more adorable than anything. Still…

While we’re here: although Davros is an interesting character, I’m not sure what he really has to offer on a primal level. He’s more of an abstract concept. And not even a very good abstract concept; I’m not sure that the Daleks need a creator, or that we need to meet him. That’s got nothing to do with what makes the Daleks work. Davros does have a right winning personality, of course. That’s pretty much what makes him. And that’s probably why the Big Finish audios are where he really shines.

The Boogieman vs. Dramatic Conceit vs. Mundane Menace

Doctor Who has a lot of “monsters” and villains like this, based on dramatic or thematic concepts rather than anxieties. Sometimes they can be rather sophisticated, as with the Silurians and Sea Devils: good conceits and neat designs, that don’t really have much in terms of boogieman credentials. So (aside from them looking and behaving oddly) there’s nothing really scary about them; they’re just interesting points of discussion.

Then there’s this third tier of monsters, just designed to look interesting and have a slightly alien culture or behavior. In the new series, the Ood are of about the same level as the Ice Warriors or Yeti or Sontarans. Well-developed and often nicely designed, yet (unless used in an insightful way) ultimately meaningless either from a primal or a dramatic perspective. They’re just pure abstraction, for the sake of having an original monster. With some of these, there is potential to pull a Silurians and justify them dramatically; it’s just not happened yet.

Someone objected that the Ood are clearly on a level far below the Ice Warriors or Sontarans, because as with the Yeti or Autons they have no self-determination. Which kind of misses the point, I think; neither do Cybermen and Daleks, really, classically. If anything, Ice Warriors and Sontarans are less of an interesting threat in that they are rational and they have their own agendas that don’t necessarily have anything to do with you personally. Neat designs, certainly. Yet they’re not boogiemen; they’re not out to scare you or get you. They’re just bullies and jerks. Keep out of their way and you’re probably fine. And again, they’re pretty much just dramatic placeholders. One proud warrior race is as good as another.

On the other hand, Autons do work (though I keep forgetting about them) because mannequins are sort of creepy to start with. It’s pretty common to see one out of the corner of your eye and not realize it’s a dummy until you turn and look at it full-on. The Autons to some extent seem to justify that existing fear. It’s not even just about mannequins, though they’re a convenient embodiment of that kind of fear. Imagining that (plausibly threatening) things are animate. Signs of life where there shouldn’t be, yet you fear there might be. Ties in to fear of shadows and snapping of twigs in the forest.

Curiously, all three of Moffat’s threats have been of the boogieman variety. They’re just so story-specific that they can’t easily be used again.

Adrift, indeed.

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Some good stuff in here. It kind of falls apart once Gwen actually finds the island. It becomes icky, and it seems like Chibnall was searching for an excuse for all of those people to be held there. Then since the excuses he found weren’t particularly persuasive, he lumped in some ham-handed philosophy about whether some things are too horrible to know. On the basis of the last part of the episode, and the lingering annoyance it’s left me, I’d say maybe. I’m not sure that’s the parallel he was looking for, however.

What a weak and uninquisitive mind Chibnall seems to have. One of the things I like about Doctor Who is its sense that knowledge and experience sets a person free. That whatever the hardship, however difficult the knowledge, it’s better to know and have done than not. It’s better to grow than to sit and cower about what might happen. But Chibnall… he consistently writes shrill characters who go histrionic when presented with anything they can’t immediately understand. And whose minds MELT when forced to deal with anything outside themselves. This… is not enriching my life.

Again, though. Some neat character and myth stuff in the first thirty-five minutes or whatever.