film and tv

Scully, not Gorey

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Changes are afoot for Masterpiece Theater, and MYSTERY! has now been wholly absorbed into it as part of the yearly run. On the interesting side, Gillian Anderson, looking prettier for her age, is the new Dianna Rigg (or Vincent Price, if you go that far back). Appropriate enough! Thing is, they’re talking as if “Masterpiece Mystery!” will now cease to have its own theme music, and will be ditching the Gorey intros for “amazing graphics”. This is all a bit sad, as the Gorey intros have made an enormous and tangible difference in my life. It’s one of those weird little personal nexus things. They helped to define much of my adult artistic sensibility, and they have led somewhat directly to some of my most important personal relationships.

Then again, the “new” Gorey intro has been in place for around twenty years now. Not that it’s in any way dated, I can see how they might be tiiring of it. Since he’s dead, they can’t just commission a new one.

In general, PBS has been rather neglecting MYSTERY! for a while. Whereas it used to be a regular companion series to Masterpiece Theatre, eventually it got folded into the run of its parent series and they ditched the host altogether. I suppose ITV hasn’t been producing cdetective series the way they were in the ’80s and ’90s. Though Poirot is still ongoing, I think Suchet only does a movie every couple of years now. Jeremy Brett is dead. Morse and Cracker are past. Does WGBH even invest in ITV production anymore? Can they afford to, the way PBS is run now?

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.

Murnau Edition

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I’m watching the restored version of Nosferatu. It’s not quite as impressive as the Metropolis restoration, on a few fronts.

Though some of the source material is startlingly excellently great, other bits are really irreparably grungy.

The translation is a bit weird and literal, with a few grammatical errors for extra flavor.

The new English intertitles they generated based on the translation are cheap-looking and far from seamless; I could have done better in half an hour in Photoshop.

For some reason they chose not to motion-estimate missing frames, so the film still occasionally skips a bit.

There’s a really long written intro that babbles on about the restoration; it’s distracting and a bit wanky.

Though it’s fantastic that they located and recorded and overlaid the original score, the original music is often not really appropriate to the mood of the images. It’s weird. There’s a horrible, creepy thing on the screen, and the music is all majestic violins.

All of that said, this is the best version to date; these are small criticisms compared to every other version on DVD. And what’s more, just as with Metropolis, the new version makes it possible to follow and appreciate the story! Before, it was just a weird dreamlike drip of images. Now it feels like a finished, sophisticated film.

NOSFERATU!!

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Oh man. Just after I resumed my ever-present musing on why nobody had released a proper, Metropolized version of Nosferatu, I learn that this just came out. Released, yes, by Kino again.

So. There we are. We’ve got it. My favorite silent film, presented as properly as it might be, for the first time in seventy-something years. And what a snazzy cover!

“All My Love to Long Ago”

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Whoa, uh. Verity Lambert, Doctor Who’s first producer (and at the time the youngest, and first female, producer in the BBC’s history), just died. On the day before the show’s 44th anniversary — its first broadcast also being one day after JFK’s assassination. She wasn’t that old; seventy-one. I guess that’s old enough, though.

The show was such a strange force back then; all staffed and conceived by twentysomething women and minorities and foreigners, working under the auspices of a department that was ashamed of them all and what they were doing, in the face of another department that was deathly jealous of them and what they were doing, both mostly staffed with old white men, most of which did all they could to interfere. That the show was a success was all the more an embarassment, as it meant they had little excuse to sweep it under the carpet.

It was over four decades ago, though. I guess it’s surprising so many of the cast and crew have hung on this long. Ms. Lambert last appeared all over the special features and commentaries to the “Beginning” box set, in which she gushed her appreciation for the new series and all its nods back to her era — from which she felt the classic series had drifted away a bit much for her liking. This past spring, she was even name-checked as John Smith’s “mother” in Paul Cornell’s “Human Nature” two-parter.

I guess things turned out pretty well, in the end — at least so far as that business goes. And who knows how large it loomed in her life. She seemed grateful, though. And it seems she was creatively active up to her death. I understand she just produced a new series of a show I’ve never heard of. Looks like it’s a criical success, too.

Some interesting commentary from “superfan” Ian Levine.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, sort of, I just noticed that Sylvester McCoy (The Seventh Doctor), Sophie Aldred (his companion, Ace), and Anthony Ainley (the ’80s incarnation of the Master) all share the same birthday (August 20th). This show seems to attract bizarre coincidences both in birth and in death.

The Unheralded

  • Reading time:3 mins read

It seems like Who fans are bizarrely rigid and humorless in their idea of a “good” story. Anything held up by characterization is a failure. Anything held up by humor is a failure. Anything held up by concept is a failure. Anything held up by warmth is a failure. Anything that isn’t spelled out, point by point, is a failure. If it’s not a straightforward story with low lighting, told with a serious tone, preferably with a lot of violence, it’s not Doctor Who.

Just lovely.

So far as I’m concerned, Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity are two of the four most enjoyable and/or intriguing Davison stories. The standout Hartnell serials, to my mind, include The Keys of Marinus and Planet of Giants.

The Mutants and The Time Monster are amongst the Pertwees I most see myself rewatching. Though there are a few decent stories before it, season seventeen is more fun and clever than Tom Baker’s period had been to that point.

With the exception of the icky Mindwarp, season 23 is one of the most droll and warm things to come from the ’80s. And then there’s the whole McCoy era, including season 24, which I find refreshing as all hell.

Then likewise, with a few exceptions (including the Pertwee reptiles), I find most of the “good” stories extremely tedious: predictable, samey, slow, long. Full of stock elements, played straight. Little attention to psychology or human behavior. How many plots have relied on one unreasonable hothead in a position of command? How many alien cultures consist of flyspeck feudal European kingdoms with political or social issues (mostly put forward or maintained by one unreasonable hothead)? How many ’70s stories rely on plots ripped from B-movies, in place of the speculative concepts of (for instance) the Hartnell era?

For the most part, the stories I enjoy are the ones that take advantage of the format to try something unusual — be that conceptual, comedic, or dramatic. By nature, these will also be the least balanced stories. Who cares about that, though — or rather, who should care? Part of the reason why season sets make so much more sense to me than individual releases is that, like the tracks on an album, it allows serials to lean on each other to make a larger point and explore a greater spectrum of ideas without each one necessarily having to stand on its on feet.

Would you release “Cars Hiss By My Window” or “Been Down So Long” on their own, to fight their way up the charts? Of course not. But as parts of L.A. Woman, the album, they’re very welcome pieces of the overall picture; they cover ground that wouldn’t make sense to cover in other songs.

By and large, excepting some accidents of fan taste, it’s the “classics” which to my eye tend to specialize in nothing and do nothing to stretch the format. And frankly, I can’t see the appeal there. Maybe it’s comforting. Maybe it’s nostalgic. It just feels like wasted opportunity, though.

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.

Fromage

  • Reading time:1 mins read

There are four levels of cheese reception.

1) Being unaware of cheese
2) Being disgusted by cheese
3) Being able to ignore the cheese
4) Being able to embrace the cheese

This = American Life

  • Reading time:3 mins read

There’s a certain irony to This American Life transmogrifying into a TV show, all the more fun for being left unstated. It’s still produced by Ira Glass, who it turns out looks like the son of Jarvis Cocker and Elvis Costello. It’s shorter than the radio show, by far — only about half an hour. The format suits the visual approach, though.

Really, I think it’s a swell adaptation. As great as the radio show is, I’m maybe more intrigued by this version. In place of the intimacy there’s a certain objective distance that puts a neat spin on the stories. The surreal narrative framework and editing adds to the effect, almost coming out the other side and making the stories more intimate.

He was on Fresh Air today, talking about his approach to adapting the show and the changes he had to make; I’d forgotten it was happening, and it sent me running to Demonoid. Two episodes so far; it seems to air on Saturdays, on Showtime.

It’s curious that this was produced for a pay channel rather than PBS. That certainly should explain how expensive and tight it looks. It also ties into some observations a while ago that what HBO and Showtime have been doing with original programming — The Sopranos, that cowboy thing — is pretty similar to what the BBC has been up to. Similar style; similar kind of expressive freedom.

Free of the limitations of commercial sponsorship and ratings — since the channel is paid for directly, in one way or another — the producers are allowed freedom to make whatever they want, so long as it’s a good product in the end. A nice perk and reason for people to subscribe, and something that maybe the channel can turn into a retail product down the road, as DVD sets. Thus there’s a certain maturity, a security to the approach. They can assume a certain level of understanding and interest without necessarily catering.

So, I mean. I was thinking about that already, making those parallels, and thinking how interesting it would be if PBS were to get the same kind of funding. Then a few days ago HBO annoucned it was cooperating with the BBC (oh?) to produce a show about Einstein’s formulation of the theory of relativity (oho!), starring Andy Serkis (huh) and David Tennant (huh!). And… what the hell, I thought, is HBO turning into the new WGBH?

And now there’s this, an NPR staple turned into a quirky Showtime experiment. So it seems there’s… at least something to this analogy. I wonder.

Serialization

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I’m getting my cable disconnected because I don’t really watch it. The few shows I do watch, I can just torrent or whatever. That’s… Lost and BSG, really. And BSG is going to be off-air until 2008, so.

Bittorrent is the future of television, I swear. Between that and DVD… The thing about BT is that it’s global. I mean. Doctor Who’s starting up again in a few days, in the UK. Though it’s being picked up sooner than before, it still won’t show on Sci-Fi for months. Doesn’t matter if you’ve DSL!

There was a recent survey I read that said that the average person in the US has something like 130 TV channels available to him — and yet the average person only ever watches something like 6% of those channels. That’s foolish. Were I given the option to choose, say, a dozen channels that I actually felt were interesting (plus all of the local stuff — PBS is important), that’d be fine. Maybe a buck a channel, per month?
Plus a ten dollar flat fee, including all the local stuff?

You can’t even get Comedy Central here unless you pay thirty-something dollars a month — and to hell with that. The Daily Show isn’t worth that much to my life. They need a system where you pay for what you actually watch. Or intend to watch.

The whole channel system is a bit screwed-up anyway. Outdated. In the future, the ideal way this would work would be subscriptions to particular shows. Which would be delivered at certain intervals. And you could watch them whenever you wanted. And it would be worldwide. So if I wanted to subscribe to an obscure Indian show that was starting to gain popularity, I could do so.

Maybe the way it would work is you’d have a certain number of points to allocate in a given month. You could buy more, if you wanted. I guess it’s kind of like Netflix — pay more to get more DVD rentals at once.

If you found a show you liked, you could have the option of starting from the current episode or starting from the beginning. Likewise, you could splurge a bunch of points to watch the whole thing at once, or you could just go one episode at a time, a normal subscription, starting from the start.

This is the way television will work, eventually. DVD sets would still exist as compilations, the way they sell episodic games in boxes.

The tide is turning; people are starting to realize that the shows are more important than the networks. DVD is helping a lot in this. And actually-good TV being made.

Eight

  • Reading time:5 mins read

I’ve said this before; the new series seems to go a long way toward redeeming the TV movie. From a continuity perspective, very little in it seems controversial anymore (“half human” issues aside); as a production, it’s always been great (Vancouver aside). The only obvious problem remaining is the pacing. The story isn’t even all that bad in the abstract; it just isn’t told well, getting caught up in procedure instead of development. Indeed, it’s full of great little moments — the kinds of scenes that people often claim to lift dry (and poorly paced) stories like Genesis of the Daleks out of the mire. And it’s these that tend to stick in my mind — the “shoes” scene and the glass-morph scene and the introduction — rather than the narrative faults.

Honestly, time has turned it into just another Doctor Who story. Any remaining continuity niggles are hardly any worse than Brain of Morbius or Mawdryn Undead; any script issues aren’t all that different from other classic stories; the acting is almost certainly superior to half the classic serials; the set design and photography are amongst the best ever. And to top it off, it’s introduced a bunch of ideas that — through their unconventionality — have in retrospect enriched the continuity more than the whole final decade or so of the original series.

So. Yeah. It’s certainly earned its place. Still. If I were to play script doctor, I’d suggest the next draft might go like this:

At the start, it would have made a lot more sense for the Doctor to have been fatally wounded in the crossfire, and to have regenerated right there — maybe when Chang Lee ran out to call the ambulance. Chang Lee could be directing the guys with the stretcher: “He’s right over… here?” And there McGann is, instead of McCoy. The attendants throw him in the back of the bus; Chang Lee just stares, confused. By the time they get to the hospital, the Doctor is ice cold; they deliver him straight to the morgue.

Perhaps before the ambulance arrived, Chang Lee rifled through the Doctor’s pockets — finding the TARDIS key, the watch, the Sonic Screwdriver. The Ambulance leaves him behind; he stares after it for a while, then turns to survey the TARDIS — this huge, blue… thing, that just saved his life.

Grace — how would she come in, if not in the operation theater? Perhaps she’s called in to do an autopsy? That would work. Would also seem to fit Fox (and her apparent Scully template) a hell of a lot better.

This already speeds up the episode a bunch. Imagine the Doctor waking on the autopsy table, and the introduction that would be. She could be shocked to discover that the John Doe was completely uninjured, despite supposedly being a multiple bullet wound. She could have her Puccini, and have the Doctor make his comment.

This would also save a hell of a lot of running around with the Doctor trying to convince her of things. It could even be sort of an intimate introduction, in place of his freaking her out entirely. To save even more time from the amnesia, he could quickly explain some of the necessary plot details, and she could be something other than a complete bint by observing that he just came to life and seems to have two hearts, so might be worth listening to with at least one ear.

Maybe a scene where he asks for his clothes; they’ve been burned or discarded; he can’t find anything except a ridiculous T-shirt and flip-flops, and has to wear those until she smuggles him back to the TARDIS — from which he discovers the Master has escaped, yet which in his place has a new and unexpected occupant in the form of Chang Lee (who might or might not make his presence known).

Maybe Chang Lee sneaks out while the Doctor and Grace are rummaging around, changing, and talking about the plot; he runs off to do his thing. The Master homes in on something or other Chang Lee snatched from the Doctor’s pocket; when he finds the kid, he does his “you will obey me” routine, and has a minion. By the time he leads the Master back to the TARDIS, the Doctor and Grace have moved on to look for the beryllium clock.

The Master can then try to steal the TARDIS; it won’t go anywhere thanks to the beryllium thing. And then he realizes he couldn’t go anywhere anyway, as the TARDIS is coded to the Doctor’s DNA — so he’d need the Doctor’s body. Thus he dreams up a neat plan: open up the Eye of Harmony conduit, thereby sending the Cloister bell ringing and the fabric of reality all inside out. Doing this will give the Doctor some problems to work out, with the world around him falling apart, yet will ensure that he returns to the TARDIS — where the Master can use the Eye of Harmony to aid him in taking over the Doctor’s body. If his plan works, great — he’s alive again, and outta there. If not, hey. What a swell final gesture, huh?

The Doctor has his misadventures on the way out and back, has his struggle; something previously establish intervenes to cause the Master’s body transference to go awry, causing him to be absorbed into the Eye of Harmony and the Doctor to be left unharmed. The Doctor muses on the theme of rebirth then makes his goodbyes, with the promise of an impending BBC/Fox/Universal TV series in the wings…

The Birth of Excellence

  • Reading time:5 mins read

So the broad consensus is that television has finally reached its golden age. Somehow, magically, it doesn’t necessarily suck anymore. People have figured out how to use the medium to do something substantial and engaging, and while not every show follows through on this potential, or does it well, the artistry is loose — and some damned excellent things have been coming of it: The Sopranos, Lost, Battlestar Galactica. Most people seem to trace this evolution down to the mid-’90s, in particular to The X-Files. A few nerds throw around Babylon 5. I recently saw a proposition that it was a three-step process begun with Twin Peaks (showing that something substantial could be done with the medium), developed in The X-Files (showing that an involving long-form narrative was possible), and refined in Buffy (moving that narrative focus from plot to character development).

What strikes me as just as important, though, is the development of DVD. Again we can thank The X-Files for establishing precedent of DVD compilations; now with shows like Lost, and shows developed straight for pay channels like The Sopranos, that otherwise have no direct commercial value, television is produced with the end user — and an end product — in mind. Whereas the ’90s shows demonstrated the artistry, DVD provides a framework; a structure. Shows are designed to be cohesive, coherent long-form narrative units that people can pull off their shelves and watch, enjoy, as a single work, with the actual broadcast little more than a taster for the eventual consumer product. I’ve even heard cases of networks developing and showing series at a loss or near the break even point (though I’m scraping my mind to remember which ones, and where I read this), with the long-term expectation of DVD revenue, once the ratings and word of mouth have made their rounds, to make up the balance. As a result, TV shows are more and more made as a long-form work, that can be watched over and over, rather than for serialization.

I’ve said before that television is, in theory, the novel to film’s short story or novella. Whereas films are self-encapsulated, short narratives with a single premise, meant to be taken in at a sitting, both novels and television are serial formats. Many novels even start off as a series of short stories (Catch-22), or as newspaper or magazine serials (Musashi, anything Dickens). It’s only when they’re compiled into a single, tangible volume that they are assessed and evaluated as complete, legitimate works. And though there is a certain elegance to the short story or novella, revolving as they do around a single conceit, there is a reason why the novel is considered the true test of literary skill: as a serial, it has the scope and structure to explore plot, character, and theme with a nuance impossible in the shorter works. Of course, most novels still suck; that’s what happens, though.

What DVD has done is allow television that objective, tangible distance. Long-form works now can be compiled and assessed as a whole, in the same sense that they provide a target structure for the narrative. It’s just a strange coincidence that it happens to have come around immediately after the artistry. I think it’s the final critical step for the medium, in that previously that objective distance was impossible to attain. Even with the occasionsal VHS release, television was transitory. There’s a reason why the BBC archives (among others) were systematically wiped; just as life doesn’t become a story until it has an ending, a serial doesn’t become a novel until it’s bound. You have to be reminded to value the fleeting because it is fleeting, rather than ignore it because you can’t grab hold of it and place it on an altar.

Film, it got its act together years ago. Decades ago. Before sound, even — though it wasn’t until the New Wave that it got all self-aware and critical. Reason? It’s already self-encapsulated. You don’t need it bound; you don’t need it on your shelf; you don’t need to have it compiled for you, because it’s brief and simple enough to be instantly comprehensible, and easily exploited. (Relatively speaking, that is.) I think there’s a reason why in film the main artistic force is perceived as the director (Charlie Kaufman aside), whereas with television it tends to be the writer. Each dictates the essental narrative structure of the work. Since film is comparably simple and short, each shot, each visual juxtaposition is of greater narrative importance. Since television sprawls, the basic narrative block becomes the chapter rather than the scene — meaning an increased reliance on script as a source of content and momentum, rather than rote imagery.

Funny thing is, soap opera was way ahead of its time. All it really lacks is sophistication and an end structure — neither of which were even developed until a few years ago.

Losing the plot

  • Reading time:9 mins read

I think the thing I enjoy about the black and white period of Doctor Who is that it’s so much more ambitious than the later eras. Ambition returns in a form during the ’80s, though for different reasons and to different results. There’s a distinct difference, though, between the day-to-day approach to stories during the ’60s and ’70s.

During the Hartnell era, nearly every story was high-concept speculative fiction of some sort. Here’s the story where everything is as alien as it possibly can be; here’s the one where the TARDIS and its occupants shrink; here’s the one where we revisit a location hundreds of years later, to see the consequences of the Doctor’s actions. Even when they’re not speculative, they’re still high-concept: here’s the one introducing a meddling counterpart to the Doctor; here’s the musical; here’s the ridiculously long and serious epic.

Troughton curtailed that trend a bit, with a bigger focus on pulp “monster of the week” storytelling. There was still room for a few speculative stories, like an acid trip to the land of fiction or to a place where all the wars in history are being fought at once. In general, though, energy was devoted to creating new creatures to frighten the kids — preferably recurring ones. Repetitious, yet fun.

Pertwee turned the show into a spy show with aliens and mad scientists, with the Doctor as the hero with the cape and the gadgets; every week there was a new evil scheme to foil. The one story that’s really stood out to me during this era is Inferno — a story where the Doctor visits a parallel Earth in order to witness what happens when he fails, then has to relive the nightmare back in his own reality. It’s almost like a Twilight Zone episode. Though the costumes and set design kill it for me, Carnival of Monsters also is pretty imaginative; it deals with the TARDIS materializing inside a miniaturized habitat trucked around the galaxy by a couple of carnies. Likewise, The Green Death is basically an allegory for the environmental movement.

Tom Baker is kind of where the series loses itself. The early, Hinchcliffe era is dominated by pastiches of whatever Hammer horror movie happened to be in theaters at the moment: travel from Sherlock Holmes Land to The Mummy’s Tomb Land to Frankenstein Land. Slap onto that a deliberate attempt to arbitrarily rewrite series continuity for short-term dramatic ends, and you’ve got a horrible mess — one which, to note, the hardcore fans generally consider the “golden era” of the show. It’s horribly dull; instead of putting creative energy into new concepts to explore, or even into creating new and original monsters to play with, or even-even new threats to London every week, this era funnels its energy into tearing down and rebuilding the series itself — whereas the stories framed by this new and hypothetically improved series are both unoriginal and told in the driest, most self-serious manner possible. The arrogance and ill handling of this era, more than anything, are what bother me about the ’70s stories.

After the BBC dumped Hinchcliffe and Holmes, with the suggestion that the show pull its head out of its ass and do something positive for a change, Graham Williams took over and generally lightened the tone of the show, turning it into a campy romp. He introduced K-9 and Romana, and hired Douglas Adams first to write for then to manage the writing of the show. The series became loopy and irreverent, and although the production values began to go down the toilet, at least the series was original and vibrant again.

Baker’s final season coincided with a complete change of direction for the show, with the oft-reviled, usually misunderstood John Nathan-Turner taking over the show. Granted, JNT had a lot of weird ideas about the show; he was a master at getting the show made, not at managing the creative side. As far as he was concerned, that was the script editor’s job. Whenever he was graced with a script editor with a strong plan for the series, the show was nearly as strong as it ever was. When the script editor was an uninspired douchebag who was more interested in squabbling with the producer than in drawing out a plan (or even managing the scripts), the show was about as awful as it ever was. Season eighteen was Bidmead’s turn, and his idea was an entire season dealing with the concept of entropy. The result: an uncannily consistent and well-conceived string of episodes, in some ways harking back to the Hartnell era.

When Davison came on board, the show was still coasting from JNT and Bidmead’s smash debut: full of intriguing experiments, carried by a continuing storyline, and even graced by a historical or two — for the first time since season four. It only took about a season, however, for new script editor Eric Saward to exert his own entropy on the series. Don’t draw out a solid plan, don’t seek out new and talented writers, don’t commission enough scripts, don’t edit what you do have — then see where the show winds up. It’s not that the rest of Davison’s and the start of Colin Baker’s eras don’t present some interesting ideas; it’s just that they’re isolated within a series that doesn’t know what it’s doing or why, and within individual scripts that haven’t received the care they require. By season twenty-two, there’s not a good story in the bunch. It’s this, more than anything, that gives Colin Baker the poor reputation he has — and it’s this that nearly got the series cancelled, for the first time.

After Michael Grade gave the production team a year and a half to get its act together (I believe those precise words were used, somewhere or other), they returned with Trial of a Time Lord. As it happens, Saward had spent that time doing… almost exactly nothing. He and JNT came up with a grand concept for the season; I guess that’s one thing. When production began, however, lo — no scripts! Last minute scrabbling and angst and anger. Result? Colin Baker got fired, and the show received one last warning.

What they did then — besides hire McCoy, who was at least very well-received at the time (even if current fans consider him the antichrist, for some reason) — was install a new script editor. As it turns out, Andrew Cartmel had almost no experience even with professional writing, much less managing the narrative direction of a TV series. What he had was a sense of perspective. His first season was a period of postmodern weirdness that fans couldn’t and can’t tolerate. Still, it was one of the most imaginative and downright intelligent periods in the show — the first breath of fresh air since Bidmead, and probably the most ballsy thing the show had done since the ’60s. Then when Cartmell settled in, watched all the old (surviving) episodes, and got a hang for what had been done before, he made a deliberate effort to bring back the ineffable qualities that he perceived had been lost over the intervening years (read: during the Hinchcliffe era). He put more of a focus on characters and long-term story, and went out of his way to find and nurture the brightest new talent available. Result: if you ignore the production and occasional casting problems, the series ended on a high nearly equal to its inception.

Now, the integrity and vision that Davies brings to the show should be self-evident. With his deliberate focus on “big ideas” (“Queen Victoria, a werewolf, and kung-fu monks!”) as a framework for character development and long-term continuity, it’s like a blend of the best from the ’60s and the late ’80s — albeit lacking a bit on the speculative end.

It’s this, here, that leads me to constantly compare the New Series to the ’60s series — before color, before the watering down and tearing down and budget and ego and focus problems. I seriously think you could watch the first six seasons, then the final three, then skip right to the new series, and not miss much of anything important.

Apply the above discussion to the Big Finish audio range and you’ll also be able to weed out the essential problems there. Whenever they do go for the big, brave, simple ideas — Scherzo or Natural History of Fear or Omega or Davros — they hit gold. Most of the time they’re content just to waddle forward with cookie cutter plots involving the Doctor and Companion arriving on X world with X political or social problem, that they need to solve. That Big Finish outwardly requests new writers not to specify what Doctor and they’re writing for should give an idea where they’re going wrong. It’s not about ideas or characters; it’s all about plots. Commodity.Words and actions taking up two hours of space, and leaving no one fictional or actual the better.

That’s not to say that Doctor Who has ever been particularly deep or substantial; it’s a children’s TV show. That, however, is all the more reason to be childlike. It’s a series about wonder and fear and finding new perpectives from which to view the world — all presented in the simplest, most digestible form. It’s basically a trainer for how to feel awe and respect for the world around us — and then to subvert it. When it (or anything else) doesn’t hit those goals, the world is deprived a little bit more.

Changing Faces

  • Reading time:4 mins read

After dwelling a bit, I am surprised by the consistency of the Doctor’s character under Russel T. Davies (and within his scripts in particular). Once again the Doctor is left ambivalent about getting close to anyone — alternately clinging and avoiding — yet now has been advised as to his objective need for someone to watch over him, setting up a rather different framework for his upcoming meeting with Martha Jones.

When we first saw the Ninth Doctor, he was shellshocked from the Time War; from losing everyone and everything he perhaps never appreciated — so of course he was both emotionally needy and reluctant to get involved, especially with anyone who wouldn’t stick around and try to understand his world, his life. He became unhealthily attached to Rose, then was reborn healed — at least outwardly — from most of the demons. As he became more dashing and confident, Rose became unhealthily attached to him, placing her desire for him above his objective needs, thereby putting his ego in a strange place. By the end he didn’t subjectively need her so much as he was used to having her, and didn’t objectively need her in that she did little to keep him in line (as she generally had the Ninth Doctor). When he lost her, he was sad and dispossessed — yet more than anything struck again with a sense of failure, of emptiness. It was a different emptiness from the Ninth Doctor’s; in place of desperation was an arrogance. Subjectively he’d shifted from need to want, and he couldn’t step outside himself. Nobody could give him what he wants, everyone leaves in the end, so to hell with everybody. What’s the point.

What Donna does is kick him in the head. “Look, Bozo”, she says, “who gives a damn what you want; it’s obvious from here that you need someone who isn’t going to fawn over you, who’s going to challenge you, and keep you from slipping into your weird place. To keep you human, as far as that goes.” That’s not going to be her, because she’s got better things to do than flit around the universe, playing nanny to a thousand-year-old god; still, she says, go find someone. And right there is an interesting point; there’s a tangible argument for the Doctor not to get too involved with his assistants. It’s an unequal relationship, where the Doctor is in effect in the inferior position. It’s been this way ever since Ian and Barbara, teaching humanity to the Doctor’s veritably antisocial first incarnation (at least, in the first several stories). When Rose lowered herself to his level, that caused problems. She was supposed to be watching over him, and she failed him. In losing her, the Doctor felt failure for his own sake — which is bad enough. For the state she left him in, however, he felt betrayal from the universe in general. And that’s not a good position for a Time Lord to be in.

It sort of makes me wonder if the only real difference between the Doctor and the Master is that the Doctor met Ian and Barbara, and has since generally had the benefit of an emotional compass in some form or another, honed and calibrated by an endless stream of confidants-slash-secretaries-slash-nursemaids, each one adding another nuance, giving the Doctor another bit of self. (Heck, occasionally even giving him their accents.)

Martha seems calculated to both gently kick the Doctor’s ass and to take an active interest in his affairs, without the danger of girly crush to get in the way of business — in a way, a more traditional companion for a more traditional Doctor. The Watson role, as played by a posh ninja lesbian.

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.