crossposts

JNT

  • Reading time:8 mins read

On a Web forum that I will not mention, a viewer on a voyage through Classic Who asked a question, before he set forth through season 18. He understood that JNT was a topic of some controversy, and wanted to know what he was in for over the next nine seasons. Is it that everyone hates JNT? What’s the deal with this era, exactly? My response:

—

It’s a tricky and complicated question, and to answer it we need to be careful about what exactly we’re talking about. Are we criticizing JNT as a person? Are we talking about his creative judgment? Are we talking about his approach to being a producer? Are we using JNT as metonymy for the show itself under his watch? All of these are different questions, each with a complicated and inconclusive answer.

The easiest and least troublesome topic is the show that he presided over. To that end, obviously everyone has their own view but these days you’ll see a fair consensus that JNT’s Doctor Who both began and ended well; it’s the stuff in the middle that’s up for debate.

Others have said the same here, and to my view it’s true; broadly speaking, seasons 18 and 25-26 are amongst the best Doctor Who that’s hit the TV. They’re the most consistently authored portions of the classic series, with strong views about how to use the show as a platform to communicate ideas. You get that in bits and pieces elsewhere, particularly with writers like Malcolm Hulke, but it’s rarely this focused before Davies comes around.

Part of the reason for this is, as Homunculette says, JNT’s approach to his job. And here we’re starting to get a little dicier, in that we’re starting to approach JNT as a person. But we’ll come to that slowly.

More than any other producer on the show, JNT kept rigidly to the letter of his role. He was not a creative person, by any stretch of the imagination, and his only input to the show’s content tended to be superficial: how things looked, how they were presented, what kinds of gimmicks might get people talking and increase viewership. JNT came up through the system, as a floor assistant, floor manager, and so on. When he took over the show, it was because he had put the work in and it was his time — not because he had a creative vision. The BBC was concerned about giving him the job, so for his first season they set up Barry Letts to oversee. From season 19 on, though, JNT was on his own.

With JNT’s focus almost exclusively on the practical nuts-and-bolts of balancing the budgets, networking, and getting the show made, with a growing side shift of promotion, that left the burden of the show’s “content” almost exclusively with the show’s script editor. So from a creative standpoint, under JNT the script editor basically is what we would now call a showrunner, except with little tangible executive power. They were solely responsible for the show’s creative vision.

Ergo, under JNT the show is only ever as good as the script editor. Beyond just the high-level vision and practical talents, the script editor’s relationship with JNT, and their ability to cope with the logistical demands of the job, tended to determine the show’s ultimate quality. Bidmead had a strong idea for what to do with the show, and was able to both cope with and incorporate JNT’s odd executive decisions and to push back when JNT’s decisions weren’t going to work in the show’s best interest. Cartmel had one of the most intense visions of anyone who has had creative control over the show, had a very strong knack for finding and nurturing talent, and had the fortune of landing his job in an era where JNT had pretty much checked out, allowing Cartmel to proceed without the degree of weird micromanagement that Bidmead and Saward faced.

Eric Saward is… a very polite man, and a reflective one. He’s also a perpetual victim. You listen to him long enough, and somehow through all his self-effacing eloquence he has an explanation for how everything is someone else’s fault. This negativity and lack of ownership comes through in his work; where Bidmead or Cartmel would find a way to work with and incorporate JNT’s dictums, Saward would just push back, say, “Oh, that’s awful,” and then fold and stand away, with the attitude of “Okay, you brought this on yourself.”

You do this enough, on enough levels of production, and it’s going to affect what ends up on-screen. And boy howdy, does it. Increasingly, as Saward’s resentment grows over the years. This is not to say that Saward is without talent or virtue, and that nothing good ended up resolving under his tenure, but for whatever reason there’s a lack of creative guidance here. Whatever coherent voice comes through tends to do so accidentally, and it’s not very pleasant.

Which brings us to JNT as a person. Accounts here vary widely depending on who’s speaking, but it’s fair to say that JNT was a strong personality. He had his views and his notions, always presented as a strong, definitive objective yet often based on a whim or whoever talked to him last. (E.g., he cast Colin Baker as the Doctor after enjoying his company at a wedding reception.) Again he had no understanding of the creative process, which could make him paranoid about what writers and artists were “up to.” He was terrified of someone trying to sneak a message into the program that he didn’t understand, that might make for a PR disaster.

JNT’s judgment tended to reflect what made for an easy production and clean books, and not having to deal with tempermental artists and things that were beyond his understanding. So, for example, regarding the end of season 21, he considered Caves of Androzani something of a disaster because of Graeme Harper’s unconvential behavior, Saward’s commissioning of an established writer who had more political pull than JNT, and generally a sense that the whole production was out of control. Meanwhile, he thought that The Twin Dilemma was the best thing he’d ever overseen, because it was produced with no fuss, it came in under budget and to technical standard, and it reflected well on him with upper management.

So, he was a tempermental person of questionable judgment and fitness for his job. He was loud and assertive, and due to his own prioririties often focused on the least helpful of all possible topics. Like when he demanded that Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, and everyone stop wasting time researsing for the show because he wanted to do a highly public Christmas panto. Promotion always trumped production, and production always trumped creativity.

He became obsessed with the growing fan community, and started to weigh decisions based on how they would go over with the convention crowds, the fanzine editors, the letter writers, and particularly the alpha fan hangers-on; the people who would regularly come by and hang out in the viewing gallery at Television Centre to schmooze with cast and crew and watch the show being filmed. The Ian Levines and company.

Which brings us to Marson’s book. JNT was of course openly gay at a time when this was still socially, even legally, dicey, and so understandably he indulged in the gay community that surrounded the show at the time. Which is neither here nor there, except that when you’re in a position of power and you use that position as a tool to exert that power over those who are vulnerable… it creates a problem.

It’s unclear that JNT was ever explicitly predatory, though he certainly enjoyed the fruits that his position brought him. However with his partner, Gary Downie, there is no mistake. He was a sexual predator, who used his position on the show to actively, aggressively pursue underage boys. Richard Marson includes in his book an anecdote from his youth where he personally had to run into an empty room and hide under a table to escape from Downie. Marson plays off his own experience for the surreality of the moment, but throughout the book he makes a damning case against Downie, all the time sketching JNT as an elusive, all but unknowable figure behind all that bluster.

So, the JNT era of Doctor Who is… controversial. As is the man who oversaw that era. My suggestion is to keep JNT in mind as a background notion, but in viewing those last nine years of the show to focus more intently on the script editor. The show’s whole creative model shifted over that period, and you can’t look at it in the way you’d look at any other period of the show, or draw conclusions the exact same way. More so than any other period of the show, before you make up your mind about what you’re seeing, there’s a tangle of asterisks to consider. Why are you seeing what you’re seeing? Why was it made the way that it was? Well, let me tell you a story…

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.

Dig Dug and the Intersection

  • Reading time:2 mins read

From birth to death, people are influenced by everything and everyone they encounter. The earlier an influence occurs, the greater the shadow it casts over every subsequent experience. The best that a parent can do is to try to give a child a useful framework to allow her to adapt and deal with those experiences on her own.

To survive, people will and must adapt to whatever is around them. That’s what learning is. Learning changes a person. And the thing about learning is that it can’t happen in a vacuum. Each of us is born with just two eyes, yet to understand a thing you need to see it from all angles. To expand one’s perspective, one needs to consult with other people; compare and contrast views, to try to find the fullest and clearest picture.

The more perspectives that you take in, strip down, and fit into the puzzle, the greater that your own becomes. If you take the view that your perspective is who you are, then as it grows, so do you.

Without the benefit of interacting with others, sharing one’s experiences, listing to theirs, arguing, butting heads, and verifying the boundaries of one’s world, a person has no chance to build her own identity — the complex, faceted lens which will allow her to survive in a complex, faceted world. Rather, she will live out her life as an avatar of her formative experiences, attempting to kludge every situation with the same hammer, unable to distinguish one dimension from another. It would be like setting Dig Dug free in the world of Grand Theft Auto.

He’s a 2D character armed with a tire pump. He’s going to keep walking to the right, and won’t even know to turn his head when crossing the street.

Assuming one has the opportunity, the weight of one’s experiences, and therefore influences, will occur far outside the influence of one’s parents. It’s the job of one’s parents to provide the resources to make the most of those experiences. It’s the job of the child to actually have them.

The Zombies of Nostalgia

  • Reading time:5 mins read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pippenjane

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Time and the Rani doesn’t particularly try to be realistic. To start with, it’s clearly written as a farce. Beyond that, several times it deliberately breaks the reality of the situation to (not to make it sound more sophisticated than it is) make some kind of meta-commentary about the show and the way it’s perceived. There’s the business about the Doctor being horrified at a vision of Mel’s face, and whatnot. If that’s not the 1987 equivalent of “the windows are the wrong size”, I’ll eat my left shoe.

The unreality of the thing has always struck me as rather the point. All the awful things in it aren’t so much awful in their own right as they are, on some level, a commentary on the lazy way the show is often put together. And in that, I think it’s mostly pretty on-target and hilarious.

I realize that the script was already sitting there and that Cartmel was less than thrilled with it, but the subversive, postmodern sense of humor strikes me as all him — rebelling against a by-the-numbers script that served no purpose and had nothing to say by turning those qualities on their heads. It calls to mind the “fanboy” in Greatest Show and the philosophical guard in Dragonfire, if a bit broader and less informed. More of an outsider’s perspective — which he was, at the time.

Davies does this all the time now — Love & Monsters, for instance. Which I realize isn’t everyone’s thing, but… well. Major difference is, he does it better.

Cybermen

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Mm. Tomb is really the only time I think they’ve been used well — as objects of creeping fear and mystery. There’s a sense they’re this contained force; they’re the snakes in this box that you absolutely must keep closed. And they just keep charging forward, blank, expressionless, incomprehensible. They’ll charm you, try the back door, use every crack to their advantage. (Much like Captain Jack?)

Mostly they’re just used as generic shuffle-monsters. Or, in the ’80s, alien race. Or as a droll bit of wank, as above.

Actually, I thought that Cyberwoman did a good job at capturing their threat. They’re like a plague, is what they are. A schlocky B-movie plague. The kind of thing you should be making up arbitrary rules to protect yourself from. Don’t dangle your feet over the bed. Don’t step on the red squares.

I’d like to see Moffat write for them.

Lacking the How-Do Ken

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I wish it were still possible to go into an arcade and wander around, seeing new things, doing things I hadn’t done before in a videogame. Like when the arcade was full of new things like Rolling Thunder and Double Dragon.

I remember what a revelation it was that you could run over and pick up the bat, or duck behind the tires. And any multiplayer was generally cooperative. You watch someone play, you think “hey, that looks neat”, and you jump in to help him.

When Street Fighter II was new, I could just go in and play it the way I’d play Final Fight. It was like a complicated eight-stage boss run.

Then everything became about penises, and today there’s no point even going into arcades anymore. The moment you start up a game, someone more obsessive sidles up to punish you for the affrontery and take over the machine. It would be neat to go out and see some of these new games, like Street Fighter IV and KOF XII, but the novelties have mostly become a thing of nuance. And if I’m not going to be allowed to play them unmolested, and study them at my own leisure, why bother? I’ve got enough things waiting in line to irritate me, without actively seeking them.

The thing is, this is all an aberration. Today the hardcore competitive aspect has gained dominance, but that’s what happens to unchecked hardcore competitive anythings, usually to their eventual downfall outside of that core group that enjoys butting heads. Some people just like to eat their soup without others homing in and pissing in it. I’d wager they would stand in the majority, actually…

Doesn’t help that games are rarely just a quarter anymore. I spend my dollar, whatever, I want to get the most out of it. If I choose not to pay the panhandler, I don’t want to get chased for a block and shouted at. (Which may sound familiar to San Francisco residents.) Maybe it would be different if there were, like, a set fee that you pay going in the door. But on a pay-by-play basis, fuck that.

If there’s a reason that arcades barely exist anymore — well, I’d put this at the top of the list.

Unpacked Excerpt

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The point in having things is that they possess some practical value, that to some degree empowers you.

This is no less true of art than of a wrench. A wrench is a physical tool; a novel or a painting or a videogame is an intellectual or emotional tool. Every perspective we absorb further helps us shape our own ideas, much as a hammer and saw help us shape a room full of lumber.

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.

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.

Master Ham

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Cartmel certainly had the same basic idea as RTD: dial the show back to where he thought it worked best — that being the first six years or so. Mysterious Doctor-as-MacGuffin, developed companion-as-protagonist, more experimental storylines.

The difference is that whereas RTD goes after all this from a populist perspective, by stripping things down and creating a new space, Cartmel was more… well, I wanted to say academic. I guess, that plus brute force. His whole idea was to twist and bend what was already there into a shape that he personally liked better. A relatively clumsy method to reach the same shape.

And yeah, the method seems to mostly be what’s at issue. RTD’s methods tend to engage and inspire, whereas Cartmel’s tend to disgust and confuse. And that is understandable.

Cartmel came to the show as an interested outsider, without much writing experience. Davies was an enormous fan, yet a disciplined (cue the snide remarks) popular dramatist. What Cartmel lacked was the affection for the material that softens Davies’ approach, and the experience to tailor his vision for mass consumption.

On the other hand, Cartmel’s insight is rather cutting and immediate, and it probably would have taken someone like Davies years to come to similar conclusions. Going by Davies’ earlier proposals, it seems to have!

Me, I don’t care so much about how either of them got there; I pretty much agree with their conclusions. I don’t have any investment in the material that they dismiss. I’m not so much interested in execution as the ideas at work, so both eras feel pretty darned similar to me — and hiccups aside, they do feel largely successful in what they set out to do. It’s almost like you could chop out seasons 7-23, and hey presto the show would be consistent.

Which of course is the portion of the show most fandom tends to put on a pedestal, so I can also understand why people would balk at this vision.

Still, hey. I’m with Cartmel. I don’t have the personal attachment. Or rather, what I do have is recent and entirely of my own creation. Whether that means it’s not “my” show or not, I don’t know. I’m just being analytical. It’s what I do. Luckily, I don’t have an army of fans to answer to.

As far as McCoy goes: the role (and the show) hardly calls for dramatic skill; what it demands is a certain off-kilter charisma and warmth. McCoy has more of a “Doctor” (read: professorial, avuncular) persona about him than anyone since Troughton. He’s also the first Doctor since the ’60s to take more of a back seat in the action, which is tremendously welcome after the previous decade and a half of ham.

An aside: Colin Baker is sort of neat in that he wears his bacon right on his sleeves. One can forgive his character his brashness, as he’s so upfront with it — whereas Pertwee and Tom Baker are more covert asses. Here, as with Sherlock Holmes, it’s portrayed as an actual character flaw. Unfortunately, not only did he never get much of a decent script; he never got a decent Watson (or Barbara) to round him off. Not until Big Finish, anyway. And now it seems like Catherine Tate will do something similar for Tennant. But back to the main discussion.

Again, frankly, with a show like classic Doctor Who, why should anyone give a shit about execution? It’s all rather low crap anyway, so it boggles my mind when people go on about the rat like it’s something tortuous and embarrassing in the middle of a piece of serious high drama, or about McCoy rolling his “R”s and garbling his lines as if Ian McKellen in his place would have transformed the show into high art.

There’s nothing objective about something like this. Watching the show is, in the first place, an exercise in transcending a charmingly tatty exterior in search of some warmth and inspiration. When you accept that, arguing about degrees of tattiness is absurd. The lighting and direction and prop and set design was often lousy in the late ’80s? Well, guess what? Twenty years on, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference between a Cartmel-era set and one from the mid-’70s.

Once you’re past the superficialities, all you’re really left with is how interesting you find the things the production team is trying to do, and whether or not you’re fond of the characters.

As far as I’m concerned, anyway, Cartmel was the first period since the ’60s (with maybe exceptions for early Pertwee and the Bidmead season) where someone really tried to do something interesting with the show’s basic premise. Maybe it didn’t always work perfectly; still, the effort is neat to see. And it had the first really well-developed main characters played by likable leads since the ’60s.

And… I mean. I don’t think this is an unreasonable or especially bizarre perspective to take. It’s certainly not an unusual one in my circles. If anything, it strikes me as a result of my lack of long-term nose-to-the-grindstone investment in the show. Which… though not necessarily a superior position seems at least a somewhat more balanced one, compared to the acid or the faux superiority that gets slung about. For whatever that might be worth when making judgments on a tatty twenty-year-old TV show.

Tools of the Trade

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Let’s look at the items in the original Zelda.

Armory

  • Wooden Sword -> White Sword -> Magical Sword
  • Shield -> Magical Shield

You don’t even need a sword, yet if you want to you can keep trading up for better stuff. You can buy a better shield anywhere; the trick is finding the cheapest price. All posturing aside, it is helpful to have some kind of a sword, and you can claim a weak one right in the first screen. It is interesting that the key word is “helpful”, though, not “necessary”. If you want to avoid it, there’s nothing stopping you.

Collectibles

  • Heart Containers
  • Triforce

There are only so many heart containers, and every time you find one you get an automatic and immediate benefit: another whole heart on the life meter. And the triforce pieces are really just there to check off the dungeons as complete, to give you a reason to delve all the way and beat the boss rather than just rummage around until you find a treasure then skedaddle.

Secondary Inventory

  • Raft
  • Ladder
  • Blue Ring -> Red Ring
  • Power Bracelet
  • Magic Book
  • Magic Key

All “automatic” items, which you don’t need to explicitly use. Only three of them (ladder, raft, power bracelet) really increase the player’s range or abilities, and I don’t think the power bracelet is ever necessary; it’s mostly just useful for opening the warp tunnels. As with the swords and shield, you never need to upgrade your armor, though hey, you’ve got the option. There are enough keys in the game that the magic key is never necessary; it’s just a convenience. And the magic book is an accessory that enhances another item that you don’t even need.

Furthermore, you buy the blue ring in a store and you randomly find the power bracelet in the overworld. You only need to use the raft once. That leaves the ladder as the only really significant upgrade here, and you get it really early on.

Primary Inventory

  • Blue Candle-> Red Candle
  • Bombs
  • Food
  • Letter -> Blue Potion -> Red Potion
  • Boomerang -> Magical Boomerang
  • Bow/Arrow -> Silver Arrow
  • Recorder
  • Magic Wand

So more important stuff here. You need candles to light the way and burn stuff. Bombs are maybe the most vital item in the game. You need a bow and (some kind of) arrow to beat two bosses. The recorder has its uses. That’s about it, though: candles, bombs, bow and arrow, and recorder. A blue candle, you can buy in almost any shop; the only advantage to the upgrade is that, like the magic key, you can use it indiscriminately. Enemies drop bombs all over, and you can buy them in stores as soon as you’ve the rupees. There are bomb bag upgrades, though once more they’re just an issue of convenience. You find the bow in the first dungeon, and can buy arrows anywhere. I think you need the silver arrow to beat Ganon, but it’s also hidden in Death Mountain, right before the final battle, so.

That only really leaves the recorder as a special and unique item that takes a while to find and is critical to finishing the game. You can buy the food anywhere, and only really need it once. You find the letter for the old women in the overworld, then buy all the potion you want — yet it, like so many other items, is just there for convenience. Enemies drop both boomerangs, and they’re only there to make life easier for the player. The magic wand only exists to be awesome.

The Bare Minimum

So going back through, what do we really need?

  • Bombs
  • Blue Candle
  • Bow/Arrow -> Silver Arrow
  • Raft
  • Ladder
  • Recorder

You can buy half of these in any store. You will have half of them by the time you finish the first dungeon. You find the raft in the third dungeon (which you can enter and complete at any time), and all that really does is grant you access to the fourth dungeon. There you find the ladder, and that opens up almost the entire game. We’ll ignore the silver arrow for the above reasons. That just leaves the recorder; you need it both to beat a boss and to enter another dungeon, and you need to go through a few steps before you can find it. So it’s the only really inaccessible and significant tool in the entire game.

Otherwise, to have all the basic tools, all you need to do is run into level three and grab the raft; use it to enter level four and get the ladder; then buy bombs, a blue candle, and an arrow, and grab the bow from level one. Once you work your way through and find the recorder, you are completely equipped to finish the game.

That’s kind of amazing, really.

As for access:

The entire overworld (save two screens) is accessible from the start. The first three dungeons are immediately and fully accessible. You can enter the fifth and sixth, though without a ladder can’t go far. You enter the eighth by burning a pretty obvious bush, that, should you go exploring, you’ll probably try to burn the first time you see it. If you want, you can beat it right up front — though it’ll be hard.

Burning and bombing are the player’s two main overworld activities. You burn your way into dungeon eight, so you bomb your way (again from a blatantly obvious location) into dungeon nine. You just can’t enter until you have all the triforce pieces, and fair enough.

Four, you need the raft to enter. Which you can claim immediately. Seven, you need the recorder to enter.

So basically, once you have the ladder the only thing aside from the final level that you’re missing out on is duneon seven — again, the recorder.

So again: almost total access within two steps. The only things hindering your progress are danger and a lack of knowledge. There’s practically nothing scripted to hold the player back.

To Put It Numerically:

Collectibles aside and including the armory, there are 26 total inventory items
of those, 8 are required
of those, 5 are freely available from the start
of those, 3 are in shops

of the items that are not freely available:
1 requires only two steps to claim
1 is not necessary until the final battle, and is located near that battle

Again, that only leaves the recorder.

Counting another way:

You start with 1 item
8 items are available in shops
7 items are just lying around to find
10 items are buried in dungeons

Of the items buried in dungeons:
5 are merely upgrades to other items

Of the remaining, distinctive items that are buried in dungeons:
4 are necessary to finish the game

Of those necessary items buried in dungeons:
2 are primary inventory items (that you can use)
2 are secondary (automatic) items
2 (one primary and one secondary) are freely available from the start of the game

Of the remaining necessary items buried in dungeons which are not freely available:
1 can be claimed quickly
1 takes several steps to acquire

A very old story

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I keep harping on this, yet the original Zelda really isn’t that sequenced. There are certain barriers you can’t get past without certain items, yet you find most of those items early on — and you can at least explore most regions and dungeons to a certain extent, whatever equipment you have. You can beat the entire game without a sword, if you want. You don’t require half the items the game offers; they’re just convenient to have. Most of the things you do require, you can buy in a shop.

What Wind Waker kind of does is try to pull the design back in that direction, only more so — yet it doesn’t completely have the confidence to break with the sequencing and hand-holding. Which, for such an otherwise free-spirited design, is kind of frustrating. It’s like it’s taunting you with excellence. This is almost such a great game. It just needed more encouragement. Or a rewrite.

You know that business at the start where you’re picking up weapons and items all over? Imagine if the entire game were kind of like that, until you found the Master Sword. Instead of necessarily having specific “treasures”, each with its own specialized use (grapple versus hookshot, for instance), you’d mostly just find and hang onto whatever objects seemed convenient to the task at hand, or looked like they’d be useful down the road. If you found really special, “permanent” items, they’d mostly just serve as a shortcut for tasks you could perform otherwise only with a bit more effort and inconvenience. Kind of like how paths open to earlier areas in Metroid games, to allow you to cut back and forth instead of taking the long route every time.

I like that Link is a real character, for once, with his own life, ideas, likes, dislikes, and priorities, that the player and the quest are just intruding on. I like the way it treats all the previous Zelda games as, literally, a legend; a relic of an unthinkable time, that doesn’t really matter to anyone anymore. I like the implication that Link actually failed at one point, by not appearing when he was needed. Someone suggested once that Wind Waker is sort of the follow-up to Majora’s Mask, in that the historical Link went off somewhere and never came back, without growing up to save Hyrule as he was supposed to. That’s pretty interesting.

And, again, I like that nobody except Ganon really cares. Hyrule is gone; life goes on.

The world has a certain coherence and thought put into it, strictly for its own sake, that the main series rarely has. It’s very much a reinvention of the franchise, in the form of a storybook; an acknowledgment that the same story will keep repeating, even if nobody believes in it anymore. Somewhere out there, maybe in the real world, there is a Link and there is a Zelda, even if they don’t know it. There is a Hyrule, buried somewhere, if you know where to look. This is pretty good stuff.

Mechanically, the game feels smooth and cozy to play. For a while, anyway, there is a real sense of adventure and discovery; that anything could be out there. The fact that you can pick up and use all manner of stuff even if it’s not an “important” item adds to the sense of improvisation. The game puts a lot of work into this feeling. It also undermines most of that work, but we’ve had that discussion.

The entire game is sort of jaded about the idea of a Zelda-like quest. (In theory; it becomes credulous as hell, in practice.) Yeah, we’ve seen this all before; tell us a new one. Isn’t the whole thing a little twee? I mean, look at this green outfit. Who on Earth would wear something like that? Yet it’s also joyful and energetic, almost driving home the message that although, yeah, this story has been told countless times before, what matters isn’t the broad structure and gestures; it’s the individual lives that are affected, and what it feels like for them to take part in that story.

It’s a very postmodern take on the series, and pretty sophisticated. Again, though, it just doesn’t go all the way — which keeps the game from really making its point as solidly as it might.

Swash awash

  • Reading time:3 mins read

“Piracy”, in the intellectual property sense, tends to have a regulating effect. If people enjoy a work enough, they tend to want to own their own copy — preferably a copy presented in the best possible quality. That’s why people buy DVDs after seeing a movie or watching a TV show, and that’s why “free samples” exist. You’d have a much harder sell by avoiding the initial courtship and just asking people to buy an entertainment product, sight unseen. To an extent, the idea is kind of ludicrous.

The downside from a marketing perspective is that if people don’t enjoy a work, and they know that ahead of time, they tend not to buy it. As a result you get these interesting effects where, say, Brittney Spears loses sales to “piracy” because people don’t consider her music worth paying for, and smaller, more interesting bands are often “made” by “piracy” because people who might like the band’s music are able to hear it, hang onto it, and judge it over an extended period.

From what I can see, the only way this could be a bad thing is if you’ve invested a ton of money in something culturally vapid, and you expect your dividends nonetheless. I’m sure the natural balance of the universe would feel powerfully unfair in that instance, and you’d be tempted to lobby the government to draft all kinds of arbitrary regulations to ensure you get the result you wanted. If you’re offering something of real merit, however, there doesn’t seem much danger of losing profit. Indeed, the more people who know, the better.

To boil it down, people generally:

1) want to own things that they enjoy
2) are willing to pay for things they consider of value
3) tend to value “legitimacy”, to a point.

If you place before a person a dirty CD-R burn of an album and a full, legit copy, both for free, I think it’s fair to say that most people will choose the legit one. If instead you charge a reasonable price for the legit copy, a fair number may still buy it if they already know that they adore the music on the disc, they know they won’t find the CD for a better price, and they can afford it at the moment. If you charge an unreasonable price, or don’t allow people to test the album out first to see if they like it, the free, dirty copy will look all the more appealing by comparison.

All that things like Youtube and P2P networking and tape-trading do is bring a level of honesty and clarity to the exchange. So long as you offer something of merit, at a reasonable price, and your customers know that they like it, you’ve got nothing to fear. If anything, this kind of distribution serves as free advertising; all it should do is increase your potential customer base, to a certain threshold. (After all, every work has only a certain natural breadth of appeal.)

So yeah, whatever. Go ahead and watch what you will, how you will. Make up your own mind what you value, and to what extent. Then go ahead and purchase the things you like, provided you’ve the money after you buy what you need. There’s nothing dishonest or unethical about any of this. Anyone who tries to tell you differently has an agenda to protect.

Who indeed

  • Reading time:1 mins read

And the show *is* called Doctor Who, not Rose.

This is something people keep pointing out, often mingled with displeasure at Rose’s prominence.

Thing is, the title is a question. It’s not called “The Doctor” or “The Amazing Adventures of the Doctor” or “The Doctor Saves the Day”. It’s called “Who the Hell Is This Guy?”. And for that to be the title, the implication is that the focus will be on whoever’s doing the asking — on the impression the Doctor makes on said inquirer. Rose’s role was to act as the audience’s eyes and voice, to explore and maybe to some extent answer the question — though even at the end she never really got a full answer. And we probably never will! He’s the enigma at the center of the series; his companions are in effect the protagonists.