Convention Comparisons

I’ve been to a few conventions in my time - good ones, bad ones, mediocre ones. I’ve just got back from a cruise convention (yes, an actual convention on a ship), and the discussion between people now taking stock of, for some, their first go at the convention circuit, has been very interesting to say the least.

First of all, a quick run-down of some I’ve been to and the experiences I’ve had. We’ll start with the worst and work up to my best experiences, I think.

5. Creation Entertainment - Supernatural

Link: HERE
Cost of entrance: $950 for the top-level entrance ticket alone (other levels are available) - not including flights (to LA for this one) and hotels.
Cost of autographs / photos: $80 and up for single photos, anything up to $150 for ‘sandwich’ photos. Autos from $50.
Organisation: They made an effort. But hey, when you pay for front row seats, I expect those seats to curve so everyone can see - and I expect the help to stop queueing question askers in front of you - whilst you’re still seated - and obscuring the guest artists on stage.
What’s On: A good range of short guest panels and talks, a karaoke night hosted by guests, maybe a party if you’re into dancing and drinking between school chairs set out in rows.
Cosplaying: Less than 15% of the approx. 5,000 attendees.
Atmosphere: Odd. Half of the place feels like they want to high-five everyone with a cool fandom t-shirt, while the other is there to whoop and cackle and scream at people on stage (with adoration, not anything else).
Overall enjoyment factor: Would have enjoyed it more if our horrendously overpriced tickets had afforded us an actual decent view, and if the parties had been… partier. All in all, I felt like I’d been very smoothly fleeced of at least $600.

4. Rogue Events - Supernatural

Cost of entrance: £110 (approx. $150)
Cost of autographs / photos: £50 and up (approx. $70) for singles
Organisation: Poor. Very poor. As in ‘people desperately tweeting each other to find out if anyone else at the con knew where anything was’ poor. Also, people waiting in queues while playing Twitter and Tumblr games to pass the time and to stop everyone going nuts.
What’s On: A full two days of guests on stage in a large, drafty hall. If you saw them all Saturday, on Sunday you could see them all again - in different duos or at different times. And the good thing was, if you didn’t have photos or autos then you didn’t have to keep getting up and running out of the hall to queue up to 2+ hours to get them. All the guests were entertaining, too.
Cosplaying: Nearly none, except for the ‘disco’ night. If you could find it.
Atmosphere: There’s something about a UK Supernatural convention that makes everyone feel just glad they’re at a con where their phone still works because they’re still in their own country, and they can use power points to charge their phones in the hotel (for the same reason), and they look around and see that 75% of the audience is also from the UK. It’s much more relaxed than a US convention (there’s no Beatlemania screaming and we don’t throw things on stage), but everyone seems to want to have a good time.
Overall enjoyment factor: The ruinously bad organisation distracted us a fair bit; unless people were speaking on stage, we were mostly searching for where we were supposed to be or racing to get food between sets. We have had more fun, and often. At least it was sunny in Blackpool in 2017.
Interesting note: Rogue Events closed down in 2017. Make of that what you will.

3. Star Trek the Cruise

Link: HERE
Cost of entrance: $900 per person, depending on the cabin (which is included). This does not include flights or hotels either side of the cruise itself.
Cost of autographs / photos: Surprisingly affordable - from $40 per auto and $50 per photo.
Organisation: Not too bad. Apart from switching times of when to pick up printed photos, or our main show event, or changing times so that suddenly they happen to clash with photo or auto ops, they may have been pretty dire at organising their way out of a paper bag, but at least they hadn’t charged as much as Creation Entertainment. However, there’s the small matter of the photo I took with Nana Visitor that I never got to collect. Thanks, ECP Ltd.
What’s On: Quite a full programme for the days you’re at sea. Obviously there’s less on when the ship hits the shore leave destinations, but what do you want? Main dining was good and the unlimited beverage package is well worth it at $500 - all drinks (except bottled water) and all tips are included. You know exactly where you stand with your bar bill at all times! They put on special Star Trek cocktails and changed menu names, etc. to make it feel themed. A bit more effort could have gone into this but it was at least better than 2017. Parties every night that went on till 2 or 3am, pool parties, 70’s discos, karaoke - lots to do for night owls.
Cosplaying: A lot. At any one time it felt like nearly 50% of the 1,900 guests on the Norwegian Jade were in uniform, or costume, or something along those lines.
Atmosphere: Mostly very good. No in-fighting amongst fans of different eras (at least not in public), not a lot of overheard grumbling. Some is inevitable, but it felt like most people where there to have a good time.
Overall enjoyment factor: Hmm… Pretty good. Apart from the cruise line getting our packages wrong, and our wi-fi allowances, and us not getting our picture with George Takei (because they didn’t tell us we had one, which we found out the next day from other passengers), and them switching things so we couldn’t see panels we wanted, it was still a cruise from Miami to the Honduras to Belize to Mexico. Not bad. And all the entertainment plus the cabin for 6 nights was the same price a gold ticket to Creation. Just sayin’.

2. Destination Star Trek

Link: HERE
Cost of entrance: €300 (approx. $370)
Cost of autographs / photos: €25 and up (approx. $31 and up)
Organisation: Pretty good. Three stages, well-documents timetables on their website a few days in advance of the event, helpers in English and the native language of the European city they’re in at the time, lines taped on the floor, wristbands to help you queue-jump if that’s what you’ve paid for - at times they could have adhered to this better but overall it was a monumental step up from Rogue Events.
What’s On: Two to three full days of panels, programmes and some quiet evening parties.
Cosplaying: Hmm. I’d say about 50%. It’s not exactly spot-on replicas or impressive Klingon foreheads, but it’s a start. And the heart is there.
Atmosphere: Again, European conventions seem to have the same dampening effect on jubilance as UK conventions. People want to have fun, it’s just that they’re a little reserved. Still, they came out in droves and the fact that one stage is just for fan panels and was always full tells you a lot.
Overall enjoyment factor: Not bad, I have to say. More fun than a Rogue Events con and a third of the price of a Creation Con, but still not quite all it could be.

1. Dragon*Con

Link: HERE
Cost of entrance: $90 - $100 for 4 days
Cost of autographs / photos: $20 and up
Organisation: They have their own app; it tells you what’s on and where, and how to get there, and alerts you ASAP if something is cancelled, postponed or moved. They’re spread over 6 host hotels (3 of them connected by ‘sky walks’, A.K.A. tunnel walkways between hotels), they have over 2,000 volunteers each con, and last year they bussed, shipped, fed, sold to, amused, entertained and kept safe over 80,000 attendees - not counting over 250 guests.
What’s On: So much your head spins. They cater to every kind of multimedia including films, tv, comic books, computer games, table-top games, D&D, music, and apps. There are always at least 5 things on every hour - 2 of each you’ll want to line up to see. There are 6 massive parties every night, one in each hotel, each with a theme.
Cosplaying: Yes. Oh Stephen Fry - yes. Last year out of the 80,000 people who actually turned up, 72% were in uniform or costume or similar. You know when you see photos of people at Comic Con and they have a perfect costume - and no-one else in the background is doing cosplay? Well when you take a photo at Dragon*Con, most people walking past in the background are also in cosplay. And don’t forget the opening parade - you sign up and they organise you into sections (fandoms) to march you around Atlanta during their peak tourism and showing-off season.
Atmosphere: PARTY HEARTY MARTY. I mean it. Everyone is there to show off their cosplay and congratulate you on yours. If you lose your friend dressed as Leeloo Dallas, do not stand on a chair and shout ‘Leeloo Dallas’ to find them, because that single hall containing over 5,000 people will shout ‘MULTIPASS’ as one and you’ll still be none the wiser as to where she is. People will high-five, others will drink, others will take photos - and then a ThunderCat will run past you, a Stormtrooper will go into the hotel Starbuck’s with a Farscape Peacekeeper, Batman will be buying an ice-cream for a tiny Ewok child, a Starfleet red shirt will back away from a Colonial Marine straight off the USS Sulaco, Sailor Moon and Daredevil will squeeze past you, Mulder and Scully will be caught chatting to Richard Castle and Kate Beckett, klingons will be at the bar toasting each other, Killjoys from the RAC will be trying to take photos with the Scarback Monks, the Doctor (9th or 10th) will be laughing with the Doctor (2nd or 4th), Tony Stark and a male Starbuck will be sharing a drink and Wonder Woman will be holding the door open for Leia Organa.
Overall enjoyment factor: Are you kidding me? This is Utopia. After 4 days you will never want to leave.

And that’s why Dragon*Con is my all-time favourite. They invite every guest they can get their hands on, 2017 was their 25th anniversary year which means they do know what they’re doing, it’s 10th the price of a Creation convention (have I mentioned how expensive they are yet?) and you will never, ever, be short of things to do. I’ve already blogged about it enough, so all I’ll say is I’ve also already mentioned the uniforms I had. And now I swear I’ll stop going on about Dragon*Con.

That’s is. It feels like I’m still jetlagged but I landed last Friday and it’s now Wednesday night, so I can’t be. Anyway, that’s my convention whinging out of my system. I’m sure next time it’ll be something much more exciting.

Soopytwist.

To Thine Own Self Be True - a crossing of 3 Doctors

Yay! Done some writing for a change. Things have been looking up recently and I’ve felt like working on things again. It was nice.

Ladies, gentlemen, boths and neithers, I give you:


Title: To Thine Own Self Be True

Rating: Rated K+ for some end-of-the-world talk. Thank goodness for the TARDIS swearing filter, that's all I can say.

Summary:
Nine, Ten and Eleven find themselves in the same pub in… Gallifrey? This can’t be a coincidence; some other Gallifreyan must be manipulating them to achieve their plans of world domination, surely. Yes, s/he is. And don’t call me Shirley.

Disclaimer: 
I do not own Doctor Who in any of its forms or any of the characters. This is all for fun, not for profit. Unless you add me to any favourites lists or leave comments. Then I profit in the knowledge that someone thinks it’s pretty good.

Contains: Nine, Ten and Eleven, Jack Harkness, an OC and two other Time Lords. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Linky-link-link: HERE at An Archive of Our Own under my name TozaBoma (because they don’t re-edit your stuff later) and HERE at Fanfiction dot net under my name Mardy Lass.

If you even visit the page, I thank you.

The end of Doctor Who

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!
Here be SPOILERS for Doctor bloody Who series 8 episode 1!



I can't. I'm done.

The more time went by after I'd seen the premiere, the more I was bothered, then enraged. Moffat set fire to a living creature and then made jokes about it as she burnt. I don't know where to start.

The humour throughout was lacking. Clara was not annoying but her ‘how dare you’ speech about not fancying the Doctor was shit. She should have said ‘how dare you I’ve seen every one of his lives and I even told him which TARDIS to steal’ (I’m not ok with the last Matt Smith ep but CONTINUITY, Moffat).

Not ok with Matt Smith calling from the past. Poor writing.

Not ok with the Doctor being racist - against Scottish people, then against English people. Stop the Scottish ‘jokes’, Moffat.  No wait - just STOP.

Not ok with so much of this ep.

I’m done. New Who is over for me. I’m not subjecting myself to this any longer, in the hope that it will get better. You win, Moffat; you’ve finally driven me away and that’s an entire household you’ve lost in terms of viewing figures.

I’m going back to the good old years of 2, 5, 9, 10 - and a few of 11. I reject your re-ordering and War Doctor (who should have been Paul McGann, you frelling twat), I reject your sad attempt at humour (aka self worship) and I reject your interpretation of the Doctor.

I’ve tried. I’ve really tried.

But I’m done.

Doctor Who’s 50th Episode

You, dear single solitary reader, know that I like Doctor bloody Who. I’ve done posts on the subject of the show, and once upon a time, this blog had a weekly vent as to how the ongoing series was doing.

Over time it trickled to a stop. Why was that? Was it really that I didn’t have enough time? Or was it the episodes that changed? The writing, perhaps?

Now we get to it. Some of the time, the writing and the episodes are pretty good. They do a good job of keeping me interested in the franchise as a whole. Rarely (these days), the episodes are brilliant and they match the energy and acting skills of Matt Smith, and are worthy of his time. I’m not saying he’s a better actor than David Tennant, or any of the other Doctors. I’m saying the episodes have been lacking, and he’s been wasted. Put him up against David Tennant and I guarantee you would find reasons for calling each of them better at some point. Strengths and weaknesses, swings and roundabouts, then.


Which brings us to the 50th anniversary episode, ‘The Day of the Doctor’. Those who haven’t seen it, look away now.



Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!
Here be SPOILERS for the DOCTOR WHO 50th ANNIVERSARY EPISODE!


Where do we start? Let’s start with something like 10.6 million people watching the episode live on Saturday, 23rd November. It was the same day that it first aired, albeit 50 years before, which was why half of us were there. It started well - the original opening from 1963 played and it all seemed fab. Then we get Billy Piper back as Rose - except she’s not. She’s just the voice of the WMD of the plot (that will seem ironic, in that ‘Rose Tyler’ is telling the Doctor to have a conscience, when in fact the Doctor that would have listened to her could neither see nor hear her). The actress is brought back sheerly because of her face. She’s not Rose, she’s a GUI for John Hurt’s use. Billie Piper is not a poor actress and I was happy to see her again - she played the part well enough for me to realise in the first few moments that she wasn’t Rose at all.

Then in comes John Hurt as ‘The War Doctor’. When I went to the official celebration on Sunday 24th November in the ExCel, London, I got to hear Steven Moffat’s reaction to the fans and the episode - and hear his reasoning behind it. And a few things grated. First, there was his idea that we shouldn’t be sticking to the whole ‘silly’ 12 regenerations and out, idea. Second, that he felt Tom Baker’s appearance at the end was just for fun and ‘for the fans’. Then there was his assertion that John Hurt’s ‘War Doctor’ doesn’t count as a ‘Doctor’ because he didn’t apply that name to himself - he considered himself not a Doctor at all, because he was apparently fighting in a war, not healing or fixing things.

BOLLOCKS, Mr Moffat. He’s ‘the War Doctor’. Three words, one of which is ‘Doctor’. This whole thing about his real name, this whole side trip to hype DW up to the point where it’s something more mythical and fantastic that it is, just so you can burn it down by eradicating all the mystery, is ridiculous. When you’re a child and you’re making up stories, and you escalate it more and more but then realise that you can’t finish it because you just can’t pull out that one aspect that would top everything and be mind-blowing and genius because THERE IS NOTHING IN THE STORY TO DO THAT - that’s where Moffat is, most days, I’m sure.

Getting back to John Hurt, Moffat seems to regard him as the 9th Doctor. I have no issue with that. The little webisode that was released (not very fairly, considering some people won’t have seen it before the 50th) showed me that Paul McGann - who SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE WAR DOCTOR IN THE ANNIVERSARY EPISODE - regenerated into John Hurt. I saw it. He had a new face, a new body. What wasn’t clear was whether he started as John Hurt with 12 new regenerations (seeing as the elixir he drank supposedly brought him back to life - or gave him new life?). I’d like to think… no. Because John Hurt was the 9th Doctor. Sorry, 9, 10 and 11 - you’ve all been bumped along one. Which makes Peter Capaldi the 13th Doctor, and therefore the last.

Oh don’t look at me like that. Yes, I believe there should be 12 regenerations, otherwise the programme would go on and on until it turned into Smallville, A.K.A. the series that wouldn’t die. Have a spin-off all about Romana (seeing as it was never confirmed or even mentioned where she was during this ‘Time War’). Have a spin-off with the Doctor’s Daughter. Have a spin-off about Donna Noble. Have a spin-off about Martha Jones and Mickey Smith working for U.N.I.T. Bring back Torchwood, but with more Gallifreyans in it. I don’t care - but don’t piss about with the 12 regenerations theory, just so Moffat can keep on doling out substandard shite and passing it off as ‘something the fans will love’.

And while we’re on that subject, pack it in, Moffat. Making shit up and then trying to justify it afterwards when people point out how it made no sense is no way to run a series. Bringing out a Sherlock trailer the day after DW airs, just to distract us with something else shiny, does not work. Sherlock is a completely different animal, and it bears no relation to the whole furore surrounding DW right now.

When I was at the ExCel in London on Sunday to hear the panels and see the fallout from ‘The Day of the Doctor’. I really enjoyed listening to everyone - but I wanted to punch Moffat. Everything out of his mouth made me want to stand up and ask him why, or how, but most especially WHY THE BLOODY HELL HE INCLUDED TOM BAKER AT THE END, WHEN IT MADE NO SENSE. I’m all for including Doctors, but when one of them is significantly aged more than when he was dying and regenerated, how can he be there like that? And don't go ‘wibbly wobbly, timey wimey’, Moffat, because that’s just pathetic. Explain it. Don’t expect that we’ll be so dazzled by a JJ Abrams-bomb that we’ll blindly find it hilarious and a ‘touching’ end to a so-so episode. It was stupid, and it stuck out like a sore thumb. I really do think Moffat just whacks this stuff in there as in-jokes and ‘look at me, I can bring you all this’, when in fact it doesn’t make sense and it shouldn’t be there. It’s not big and it’s not clever, Moffat. It just invokes Fridge Logic and enrages fans.

Tom Baker could have been just a curator. He could have been someone a little bit eccentric who the Doctor met and liked. But implying so heavily that he was the Doctor? Bollocks. Wrong. Annoyingly so.

In short, I did enjoy a lot of the episode. It’s always good to see David Tennant as the Doctor, and this was no exception. I liked how they got along. I liked the door argument, I liked how they brought in other Doctors, and that we saw more of Gallifrey (and, by the by, how the head Gallifreyan said he saw ‘all 13’ Doctors at the end in the TARDISes). There was a lot to like. But there were points where Moffat, again, brought his own indulgence into it. Forget Russell T. Davies' efforts to squeeze in things he liked - Moffat does it like it’s owed to him. And I really, really despise that. I hope with Peter Capaldi coming in, the tone changes slightly, and we get good stories to really ground this new Doctor. After all, we now have a new Doctor and a companion whose back-story and Being Very Speyshall moment has passed. There is so much potential here for a fantastic series - and hopefully, Capaldi will stay for a few years.

More than anything, I hope Steven Moffat hands the show over to someone who isn’t all about the shiny things they can flash in our faces, in the hope that we won’t notice the plot holes and his failure to finish off a decent story.

Rant over. I need a cup of tea.



Tags:
~ Doctor Who ~ Steven Moffat ~ Matt Smith ~ David Tennant ~ Peter Capaldi

A female Doctor?

I read an interesting article a few nights ago. I couldn’t sleep afterwards, because I was a little perturbed - angry, actually. What did I read? Oh nothing. Just this raging tirade of mansplaining and sexist whining: “Who should be the next Doctor? ANYONE but a woman! With the next Time Lord tipped to be a Time Lady, our TV critic explains why it can't happen” - by Christopher Stevens.

[I think you mean ‘shouldn’t’ happen, not ‘can’t’. ‘Can’t’ implies a lack of ability. Of which there isn’t.]

I’ll get right into it:

“The character faces his greatest ever threat - regenerate as a woman.”

Why is that a threat? A threat to what, exactly? Is being a woman a bad thing? I don’t understand, Mr Stevens - are you saying being a woman is a threat to a Time Lord’s way of life? Or it’s just bad to be a woman? There’s a word for that idea.

‘I would like to play the new female Doctor Who. I don’t just want to be his sidekick,’ Helen Mirren has said.

Bloody right she doesn’t want to be just a sidekick - and why should she only be considered as a sidekick? Because she’s a woman? There’s a word for that attitude.

“[Making the Doctor a woman] would betray a British tradition. The character has been a role model for three generations of boys.”

Boo-hoo, boys. There are two handfuls of other people you could use as a role model: James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Thor, some bounty hunter from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Kirk, Spock, Ben Ten. The list goes on. What do girls get? I dare you to name two.

If you think, Mr Stevens, that girls aren’t ALREADY play-acting at being the Doctor in playgrounds and back yards all over the UK, you’re very much mistaken. Why are they doing this? Because gender doesn’t matter when it’s a great character, and let’s face it, as a girl, you’re seriously out of options? Maybe. Maybe it’s just because there’s no-one else on TV.

I understand that boys need the Doctor to look up to - but wait, it doesn’t matter that girls don’t have anyone to grow up emulating? If you don’t want girls taking all your role models then write some girl ones. And I don’t mean pathetic attempts at Disney princesses like Cinderella and Snow White. What’s that you say? Those princesses are out-dated? Are you really that naiive? Look around - where are all the contemporary princesses that replaced them then? (We had a start - we had Meridia, from Brave, and the American media branded her a lesbian for not wanting an arranged marriage - because any girl who doesn’t do what society wants her to must have something wrong with them. But there again, why is the word ‘gay’ an insult? A post for another day.) Where are the female superheroes? Where are all the good, clever, independent female characters for girls on TV? Oh that’s right - you can’t think of more than two, can you? (After Black Widow, I’m stumped.)

Christopher Stevens implies it’s ok, because the Doctor always has a female sidekick - girls can aspire to be one of them. DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE? You want girls to aspire to be a SIDEKICK. As in, someone reliant on the main character. As in, someone badly fleshed out and seriously lacking in character development. As in, someone who cannot achieve or win on their own merit. That’s what you want your daughters to grow up as?

And when you say ‘but people should be able to choose what they want’ remember that women and girls ARE PEOPLE TOO. What you’re thinking is ‘men can choose what they want’. You’re half right: PEOPLE can choose what they want. Lest you’ve forgotten since the last paragraph, girls and women are people too.

If you want to believe that girls aren’t already play-acting at any one of your favourite man-crushes that you jealously keep so close to your chest, then look around at any ComicCon in the world. You’ll see gender-swap costumes all over the shop. Why? Because there is a serious lack of well written female characters - Han Solo’s attitude, Clint Barton’s personality, Storm Troopers are more fun when they’re female. Never mind that Leia was twice the badass that Luke ever was (the most common incarnation? The ‘Slave Leia in Bikini’. I wonder why). But there again - Leia was one female in a whole host of men. What if the movie had been different? What if every single character had been the opposite from the get-go - Yoda, Ben Kenobi, Han Solo, Luke, Darth Vader, the emperor, all the officers and soldiers - in fact EVERYONE - had been women, and only Leia had been a man? People would have assumed it was just a bunch of lesbians - because women cannot be friends without sex coming into it, obviously. Think about that, next time a man and his man-friends are off having a night out down the pub. Because if they’re all the same gender and they’re all gathered together, they must be gay. Why? I have no idea, but that’s what people think when women get together down the pub. But getting back to a gender-flipped Star Wars: people would not have accepted the movie, perhaps. They would have moaned that most of the cast were women, so the film would have been a boring litany of scenes about nails or hair or men or all those stereotypical tropes that men falsely believe occupy women’s minds.

“Why must the Doctor fall victim to a politically correct trend for ‘gender neutral’ childhoods?”

It’s not gender neutral, Mr Stevens, it’s ‘gender equality’. (‘Gender neutral’ would imply the Doctor doesn’t have one - which is interesting, as he’s spent most of his 1,000 years being asexual.) Why must you stop little girls from having a role model on TV as well as the boys? Do the girls not count as people? Are they second place to little boys? There’s a word for that attitude.

“It may come as a surprise to many in these liberated times, but most little boys still grow up wanting to be men.”

So why are you whining and moaning like a three-year-old, Mr Stevens? Why don’t you share with your son how women are people too and little girls also deserve role models on TV? Why do you feel that forty-nine years of Doctor Who stories isn’t enough for boys to draw on? Do you really think that making the Doctor a woman will somehow turn every little boy who watches the show into a girl? And while we're at it, you do realise that GIRLS watch the show too, right? So by your way of thinking, it's ok to turn every little girl who watches it into a boy? Thanks.

“And what finer example of a man — brave, reflective, with a keen sense of heroic duty — is there than Doctor Who?”

(I think you mean ‘The Doctor’, not ‘Doctor Who’, but we’ll let that pass.) Aeryn Sun, from Farscape. Leia Organa, from Star Wars. Kira Nerys, from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. Oh, sorry - they’re not men. Whoops. And they’re also in sci-fi or fantasy, which means they’re safely ‘not real’, and can be dismissed as flights of - quite literally - fancy. Oh, and they’re not in the kind of shows that young children should be watching.

“The Doctor’s strength is that he always wins through by thinking rather than fighting.”

Welcome to what women have had to do for the last few hundred years, Mr Stevens. This is why we blog and debate and campaign for change, instead of stamping our feet and whining when we feel something is UNEQUAL.

“[He’s] an antidote to mainstream comic book and action movie heroes [like] Batman, Spiderman, Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan, Rambo and Wolverine. The Doctor was specifically created to counter that trend.”

Tell me how that’s different from a woman.

The fact of the matter is that 51% OF THE WORLD is made up of women. And yet still, women don’t get any decent characters or in fact people on TV. You want girls to stop aspiring to be the Doctor? How dare you. The Doctor is limitless. He’s a Time Traveller. His friend the Corsair was a man or a woman at any given regeneration. The Doctor has travelled through at least four of the TARDIS’ eleven dimensions and seen a lot of shit. Why would being a woman for once be odd? (As in, for one regeneration.)

Oh, I forgot. A lot of people think that being a woman would be beneath him. Is being a woman so shameful? Less smart? Less capable? Apparently, Christopher Stevens and other journalists in the UK still think so. Thank you. Thank you for condemning my entire gender to the second place in every show, the background of every movie, the adjectival reference for the male of every book. Thank you for putting me in my ineffectual, sidekick place.

Would boys stop looking up to the Doctor simply because he became female? Or would it actually benefit their development into an emotionally mature, independent thinker, who takes people for their abilities and character instead of their gender or looks?

If boys really didn’t have the Doctor to look up to, who would they replace him with? Their fathers, perhaps. Would it be their mothers? They could do worse - because you know who else did that? Joss Whedon. George R. R. Martin. Maybe that’s why they write women as PEOPLE (and viewers vote with their money and make them popular), and not ‘the token female character’.

What you’re saying is, it doesn’t matter if girls don’t have anyone to look up to, because they don’t count. They don’t matter. That’s 51% of the world you’ve just dismissed as unimportant. Why? Don’t forget, around 75% of primary school teachers in the UK are women. Are you saying you don’t think they matter, except when they’re teaching your grubby little child manners in the classroom, how to wash their hands at break time, how to behave toward other students on the bus, how to become a tiny functioning person in society? Well done you.

Go on, say it - “That’s different.” Women are good teachers, because CHILDREN. It’s ok, because CHILDREN. Really? So all a girl has to look forward to is growing up, being someone’s sidekick, looking after children either for her job or her life, and clawing what respect and meagre pay she can (roughly 70% that of a male colleague in the same position) because of it. Wow. Because obviously, men can’t look after children. Obviously, men can’t be teachers and be effective nurturers of talent, of creativity, of learning. Unless they’re the Doctor. Oh, hang on, they can when there’s a high-paid university lecturer position going. But that’s ok, because that’s for GROWN-UPS. Children can be left with their wet-nurse of a female primary school teacher; real grown-up young PEOPLE can have real men to teach them. And when I wrote people, you read that as ‘men’, didn’t you?

‘But female characters on TV are crap characters, or the shows are awful, so they get cancelled’. Consider the source, son. Who wrote them? How much do they know about the subject? Why are they writing about something they know nothing about? (“I don’t understand women; they’re like aliens. I never know what they’re thinking” - said 60% of all men ever). I wouldn’t commission Michael Bay to write a tense, thrilling courtroom drama, or M. Night Shyamalan to write a Zucker brothers comedy. Similarly, I would never commission Stephen Moffat to write a convincing female companion - or a Doctor.

You know what? So far, Chiwetel Ejiofor has had my vote. But I’m re-evaluating that decision in light of all this controversy that isn’t and shouldn’t be: I vote they make the new Doctor Sue Perkins (except we all know they won't, because they won't even cast a non-Caucasian in the lead role; this is the BBC, remember. They're not here to rock any boats or actually change anything, or even keep up with the world). She'd be into science not shoes and physics and wormholes and one day a ‘pretty’ dress and one day a dapper suit, but the wisdom of ages and the knowledge of everything she’s ever done, as a PERSON, mixed up together in a maelstrom of fun, discovery and sheer joy of being alive and ABLE to keep on discovering.

Oh wait. That sounds like my mum.



Tags:
~ Doctor Who ~ Daily Mail ~ sexist ~ role model ~ feminism

Doctor Who, Christmas 2012

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!
Here be SPOILERS for the Doctor bloody Who Christmas Special 2012!

Right. Now you lot know I love Doctor bloody Who, right? I mean, just look at the panel on the left there and note how many times that tag has been used on this site. A million. Well, close-to. Whilst it’s no secret that I have issues with the way Moffat has been writing and running the new regeneration, I hope it’s also no secret that the reason I keep bitching and moaning about - BUT STILL WATCHING - it is because I want the next episode to be better, to be great, to be good enough for Matt Smith. Because Matt Smith is doing a wonderful job; it’s the stories that are letting him down. Well no, actually, it’s the writing, not the stories themselves.

It was with due excitement and anticipation that I sat down with my flatmate to watch this year’s Christmas special. Every year I look forward to it - because, in 2010, we had the sharks and Michael Gambon, and it was so brilliant we watched it again this Christmas Eve. Everything about it was ace. We’ve had some great Christmas specials, and at the end of the day, I just want DW to be good. So we got some tea ready, pulled on our Nana Rugs, and set-to.

The episode was going swimmingly, albeit a little slowly. I get the inversion; in 2010 it was the Doctor bringing the spirit of Christmas to a Scrooge-type git. Last Christmas (a bit of a let-down) was all about the Doctor bringing families together because he just wanted to help. This year, after all that’s happened, it’s all about the Doctor not wanting anything to do with anyone. Nice change. So, to, was the fact that he had an alien and two out-of-their-time Earthlings to help him. Strax was great, and Vastra and Jenny were brilliant as always. There was good dialogue, some nice touches, and it was interesting. In fact, the episode was doing really well until it... wasn’t.

In a nutshell: been there, done that.

I know the universe will go on and on about this, speculating what exactly Clara is and how she’s doing it, but really, Moffat, just stop. We’ve already had (1) companions/recurring characters who die when we first meet them, and then have their life/lives played out in reverse, knowing their ultimate fate can never be changed, and (2) impossible things. Combining the features of the rather original storylines of Captain Jack Harkness and of River Song into one new series arc does not make it new. It makes it feel recycled and the same old stuff just rehashed one more time; done that.

While we’re on the subject? The moment Clara had to give Vastra a one-word answer as to why the Doctor should help, everyone in the universe groaned ‘don’t say POND’ (or at least I did). And then she did. Echoes of ‘that name - Rose - keeps me fighting', anyone? Done that.

The whole Rory Williams idea of dying a million ways from Sunday, once per episode? Done that.

As soon as Clara asked about kitchens and soufflés, I sagged into the sofa with all of my soul. I was hoping she’d be a different character, some innocuous friend who runs around having fun screwdrivering and investigating and generally getting a kick out of living on a spaceship, Donna Noble-style. But no. She appears to be have been prepped for turning into another Impossible Thing - like Jack Harkness. I’m just hoping The Writers That Be develop the idea differently and it all comes out in the wash as hinging on the Doctor, and not Clara. Because one more Companion being the absolute reason for everything and saving reality as we know it in some big series finale is really going to make me stop watching the Moffat years and go back to DVDs. What if she has more in common with the Doctor than just popping up places after she’s died? What if she can keep coming back from the dead, spanning decades? That kind of sounds like Captain Jack. If she turns out to be Jack's daughter, I’ll be thrilled. And I'm not even joking.

Would-be Companions throwing themselves at the Doctor, with kissing and one-sided flirting and all that teenage-girlie stuff? DONE THAT. WITH BELLS ON. Oh please, give us a lesbian, or a straight bloke, in the TARDIS. PLEASE.

Having said all that, we did get new villains, which was nice. If they’d brought back anything from previous series I would have been really bored. However, the villains themselves were never properly explained. So the Snow Globe of Doom was something vaguely to do with Richard E. Grant - and then it wasn’t. Right. Couldn’t we have had three or four throw-away sentences from the Doctor, saying he’d heard about these ‘parasites’ (the only clue we’re given to why there's a story here in the first place) on some-such planet, that they were called ‘Species ABC’ and they were said to use people’s thoughts etc. to enable them to do Very Bad Things? A little information on them would have gone a long way to showing that the episode itself knew what was going on. Instead it’s taken over by Clara and the family, and their Magic Tears of Deus ex Machina. It’s like the entire plot of the Ice Lady and also the Evil Telepathic Snow that seemed to have randomly come out of nowhere - a point that nobody, including the Doctor, cares about - abruptly turned into bothersome fluff that was no longer important; Clara was everything, Clara was the key, Clara made the family cry and together they appeared to wipe out the entire plot without needing the Doctor or in fact us to see it happen. What was the point of the end, again? We had a kind of build-up with the talking snow globe, the Toclaphane-that-wasn’t, trying to take over the world, but then the Ice Lady just seemed to go by the wayside (how did she even cease to be, again? Did anyone notice or care?) and the Snow Globe of Doom just... melted. Because of rain. Made real by some kind of unexplained link with a bunch of people and their tears.

Riiiiiiiiiight, she types scathingly.

I’m all for working stuff out as you go along, but this seemed oddly lazy. Or, perhaps, snatches of script had been cut for length - unfortunately, just the parts that would have made it a better episode.

To say we were disappointed, in that frightfully English way, would be correct. There were good moments; we enjoyed Matt Smith and he no doubt did everything he could to make a go of it. However, you can’t bail out the Titanic with a thimble. Good things: we enjoyed Strax and his alienness. We enjoyed Madam Vastra giving Richard E. Grant lip and being right. We enjoyed a lot of the dialogue. We liked the new music (well, return to older style, I suppose) and the face-in-the-credits again. We liked the new TARDIS layout. We liked that Jenna-Louise Coleman managed to make this Clara a lot less annoying than her last incarnation. We liked the premise we were handed at the start. But then it all dribbled into the last few minutes that took us away from the Doctor and away from any kind of ending, good or bad. No closure, no sense of being finished - just a reason to set us on our way for the rest of series seven. So was all this simply a vehicle to get to what he really wants? Clara Oswin and her amazing amazingness of bemazement? Not good, Moffat. Not good.

I will be watching the rest of series seven; that goes without saying. Because I want it to be good. I really do. Please, Moffat - sort it out. Give us back our good old days of DW.

Soopytwist.

~ DW ~ BBC ~ Matt Smith~ Steven Moffat

Doctor Who 7x01

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!
Here be SPOILERS for Doctor bloody Who series 7 episode 1!


First off, I’m confused. I thought Seven had a bit of a to do with the daleks and they accidentally destroyed Skaro. As in, destroyed. Maybe I got the wrong end of the eyestalk, but that had me under the false (?) impression that there had been some time travel involved.

And then the daleks - not the bright shiny ‘new’ ones that the Doctor made by accident with his jammy dodgers? Oh. So… no time travel? These aren’t previous daleks, but current ones? Someone tell me. I was a bit lost.

Amy’s only annoying bit was the “Who’s scared? Geronimo” moment. Not Karen’s fault, that cheesy line, but I just felt it was a little overdone.

Talking of overdone - Oswain was pretty funny until it grated. It felt to me that she was forcing herself to over-achieve and be quirky and crazy and cool and amazing. The first thing that came to me was Mary Sue. She hacks things the Doctor can’t hack; she’s holed up like Newt from Aliens; she’s just so fucking amazing she sweats awesome!sauce. Her amazingness was as overdone as her soufflé. Making a point to the audience or a little too much character-love?

Mary Sue. She really was her own Mary Sue. Given her circumstances, can’t blame her for that. Then the character wasn’t so annoying - in fact, I felt bad for intruding on her private space by having seen inside her head (no pun intended). But then - here we go. She’s so BAMF and goddamn brilliant that she manages to purge her dalek programming and makes the Doctor leave her behind to save himself and the others. And as she knows she’s about to get obliterated? She’s smiling and carrying on as normal. I mean, I know she’s pretty fucking made up with the fact that she’s beaten the daleks because they made her into one but they couldn’t make her into one, but that was a bit weird for me. For me it didn’t come off as ‘VICTORY GRIN! TAKE THAT, DALEK BASTARDS!’, but was more like ‘wheeeeeeeeee! I’m going to die! Huzzah!’ This probably wasn’t as Moffat intended, but that’s how it felt to me. Millions of children around the world are now going ‘Mummy, is she really dead then?’ I’m still wondering about her face just then, and her ‘last words’, myself.

Which brings me to... Dear Moffat. I swear to the god who is Stephen Fry, if you repeat yourself with seeing-how-the-Companion-dies-on-first-meeting-and-meeting-them-earlier-in-their-life, we are done. If this character comes back at some point (and I haven’t read spoilers or cast lists or pretty much anything at all to do with DW) then it’d better be in a way you haven’t done before. Time travel: great. But you’ve done this before. I don’t want the character back, unless Oswain hacked into the TARDIS (ouch!) and uploaded herself by virtue of her amazing programming skills. If she’s not a continuance of where she left off, I’m going to be upset. —That’s if she ever does come back. She doesn’t need to unless someone hits her over the head with a hammer to knock all the trying-too-hard-to-be-ace (ace? Ace? Baseball bat? We don’t need another Ace - who already wins over Amy in my book) out of her. That is one Tigger that really does need un-bouncing.

Overall, a good episode. Twisty and mostly fun. Matt Smith continues to deliver and I’m still waiting for him to get the writing he deserves. Rory was brilliant as usual. Amy wasn’t as annoying as normal, but she was made to look two-dimensional in this ep, as if the single problem they ever had was kids. I’m sure that triggered a million other proper grown-up problems, but they’re not going to go into that in a ‘kids’ show, so I’m guessing they condensed that whole mess into that single scene as an excuse to get them back together.

Think that’s about it. Except to say: bring back Donna. There. Done.

Writing and stuff

For those of you just joining us, I write quite a bit. Right now, I’ve got five books of a space opera / sci-fi saga written, one of which is completely sorted and in the hands of a few agents, in the hopes that someone will want to sell it to publishers for me. I’ve also got another sci-fi book going on, but that’s nothing at all to do with spaceships and planets and new languages and cultures and dead people and bad guys and such. Well alright, it has one bad guy, obviously. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a book. But when that stalls and I just can’t get anything done on it, it’s fan fiction I play with. Right now I’m in the middle of a ‘Supernatural’ and ‘Sherlock’ crossover. It’s actually going pretty well, although I’m not too impressed with chapters five or six - they need overhauling. I’ve already done a ‘Supernatural’, ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Torchwood’ threesome (oh no, people, no! I don’t do slash!), and a ‘Sherlock’ and ‘Doctor Who’ crossover, so this seemed like a proper giggle.

Aside from this, and taking into account that I can’t seem to make an agent want my stuff so far, I’ve just started a course with The Writers Bureau. Hopefully, this will eventually get me work as a freelance article writer. From there, apart from giving up my day job in time, it might help me get an agent. That’s the plan, anyway.

It’s kind of making me rethink everything I expected of my life. I always knew I’d never have a ‘normal’ job - routines and habits are really hard to keep. I can’t even be arsed to keep smoking. But a freelance writer? Finding jobs and submitting stuff and keeping myself in jobs that way? Risky, obviously. It’s not guaranteed work and it’s not guaranteed money. But hey, if I can sell a few books too, maybe it’d be ok. And to be a freelance person, you have to pretty much go out and see stuff - coffee shops don’t cut it. Trips across the harbour even (gasp!), concerts, films, restaurants - activity type stuff. Which means I’ll have to leave the house, but then again, it’s going out to do all the things I really want to do anyway. So it’s all good.

Apart from writing, I’ve also had a stonking good time with a ‘Supernatural’ rewatch - starting with the pilot. At time of writing, I’m up to 2x10 (Croatoan). Bloody good fun all round. It was season seven that reminded me how good the series could be, after season six was distinctly lacking. Anyway, the blow-by-blow account of the rewatch is here.


What else? Or yes. I’ve decided that Life never stops long enough for me to make the changes I want, so I’m giving Life two fingers and doing what I want anyway - i.e., joining a proper gym and getting back into some martial arts. Wing Chun, to be exact. I cannot wait - and I don’t say that about a lot of things that don’t include Christian Bale or Jeremy Renner. I have a kind of induction to get through and then it’s boot camp/pilates/Wing Chun time. In a word: HUUURRGH.

That’s pretty much it. It looks like I’m back to blogging after all. I’ve been having so much fun on tumblr it’s unreal, but sometimes you want a proper bit of text, rather than sixteen million snippets and half-sentences and amusing dancing gifs.

So there we have it. Soopytwist.

Tags:

fan-fic ~ Supernatural ~ Sherlock ~ writing

What Is And What Will Have Always Not Already Will Have Been

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!

Here be SPOILERS for Doctor bloody Who series 6 episode 4!

On a whim, and thinking on a comment by a friend about the present state of Doctor bloody Who, I re-watched the series six episode ‘The Doctor’s Wife’. And here are my thoughts.

First off - strange title. Or is it? Married to the life, connected to the one thing that has been constant in his life for the past 700 years, it was fitting enough once the opening salvo had taken us to the opening credits. I’m sure many fans were contemplating River Song’s involvement in all this - at time of broadcast, we neither knew who she was, nor what she was doing with such intimate information as to the Doctor’s real name (still a MacGuffin if ever there was one). Giving this episode such a title was partly to titillate the masses, I’m sure.

Very early on, we’re introduced to the idea that the Corsair - a word taken to mean pirate, or privateer - has sent a distress call to the TARDIS using his personal tattoo as proof of authenticity. This gets the purr wee Doctor all excited - after all, he’s supposed to be the last surviving Gallifreyan (not counting people unaccounted for, such as Susan, Romana, the Mad Monk, Omega, etc.). This Corsair chap seemed to be right up the Doctor’s alley; ‘one of the good ones’, ‘a hell of a bloke’, and even, in a female regeneration (inadvertently - or otherwise - letting it be known that Time Lords did actually change sex during their long lives), ‘a bad girl’. It sounded like just the kind of person the Doctor would jump about with, going to all those cool bars and being the hoopy frood with the hip friend everyone loved. With bananas in their pockets, of course.

Once we’re at the destination of the distress signal and it’s clear we’re all too late via a lovely bit with an Ood, it’s not exactly standard sci-fi fare. Yes, it’s a clear body swap and yes, it’s a prisoner having found a way to escape, but it’s more than that. Why? The characters involved. For once, the Doctor is allowed to hope that someone else of his race survived (barring the Master, of course. If I were the Doctor, I’d still be a just a little tetchy over making him regenerate when he really DIDN’T WANT TO GO). Amy even says the only reason the Doctor is so desperate to find the apparently hidden, living Time Lords is because he wants to be forgiven. And here we have a subversion; instead of the Doctor doing the standard blowing it off and stoically pretending nothing of the sort, he comes back with a very quiet, very humbling ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ This is more than enough to silence any Companion. Amy is suitably mortified. Leave it to purr wee Rory to be the sensitive one, though. His faithful earnestness all the way through was touching, and a very effective counter-point to the rest of the episode.

When the Doctor finally believes what the TARDIS is telling him - from Idris’ mouth - we get a marvellous if tiny, shiny moment of TV legend. Words cannot express how much I loved that weeny sliver of affection, of alien appreciation; the TARDIS knows what the Doctor calls her, and he protests that he only calls her that ‘when we’re alone’. Magic. That’s what he’s attracted to, and every Earth girl wannabe should bloody well take note. Everyone’s idea of ‘sexy’ is different - and, lest we forget, the Doctor is an alien whose childhood consisted of learning an alphabet that uses maths for its basis, playing with Röntgen radiation blocks in the nursery, staring into untempered schisms and time vortices and then being old enough to get lashed with his mates at the Academy. He’s seen the fall of Arcadia, the end of the Time War and every one of the Time Lords. (As House says: ‘Fear me, Doctor; I’ve killed hundred of Time Lords’. And the Doctor’s chilling reply? ‘Fear me: I’ve killed all of them.’)

The ticking clock is introduced - the TARDIS will cark it if she stays in the fragile corporeal body attached to only four dimensions instead of her usual eleven. The plot is set to get her back to her own space before Amy and Rory are killed off by the entity formally known at ‘sentient asteroid’. Now we’ve met sentient suns before, and let’s face it, this is Doctor bloody Who. It’s not the weirdest thing we’ve seen them be, to paraphrase Tony Stark. And at least this sentient plot device can talk - with the voice of Michael Sheen, Welshmen and Hollywood actor extraordinaire, no less.

While Amy and Rory are pounding up and down TARDIS corridors - whether belonging to Eleven’s version or not, it’s never made clear - we get a glimpse of life beyond the control room. It shows other places exist - good. It takes away a little mystery - bad. All in all, the effect is impressive - and, as we later learn, may not have been the actual truth anyway. So it’s all fixed, in a potential retcon kind of way. I was on the edge of my seat waiting for the ‘archived’ control room - could it possibly be Five’s? As it turns out - no. It was Ten’s - not in bad nick for a set they put in the Earl’s Court exhibition and then brought back again. Part of me was sad it wasn’t Five’s (I’ve seen that at Earl’s Court, too!) - but then part of me was glad it was Ten’s.

And so to Idris. Hmm… Either named after an ancient Welsh astronomer, whose throne you sat on for one night and either emerged a genius or a madman, or the now defunct operating system. And a nice update/reference to Ten’s ‘timey-wimey’ comment - Amy mentioning how it’s all ‘spacey-wacey’. The Doctor, bless him, attempts to explain, but in the end he has to give up and just go ‘Whatever’. Amy’s only human, after all.

So is it a good episode? Undoubtedly. The concept of something that eats TARDISes may have arisen through entities luring Leviathan spaceships in so that the living ship, Moya, could be eaten (‘Farscape’, episodes 3x06, 3x12), but it was done neatly here. The framework was well-hung, and even Rory providing lampshading (as well as being the universe’s butt-monkey, as usual) was seamless. But the performances - oh dear god-who-is-Stephen-Fry, the performances...

Two outstanding moments from Matt Smith: the ‘only when we’re alone’, whilst talking to who he now recognises as his TARDIS, and the heart-wrenching moment where he realises he’ll be lost without her to talk to: ‘Please... I don’t want you to go’. His only companion from Gallifrey, the only piece of himself he can attempt to control, the only one who’s been with him since he was 200-odd (according to her). The only one ‘mad’ (or ‘man’?) enough to let himself get stolen by a Type 40 - and now he has to go back to the one-sided conversations he had before. Perhaps he’s listening to the wrong voice.

Rory - as always, quietly amazing. It’s been a shame since the very first episode of series five that he wasn’t taken into the TARDIS instead of Amy full stop. The Sam Winchester of England, in terms of his apparently bumbling nature and everyone’s eagerness to underestimate his tenacity - and just a hundred ways in which he Took A Level In Badass throughout the series - he gets my vote. He grew on me and I didn’t mind at all. Amy, on the other hand, was quietly not annoying. This got many millions of thumbs-up from me, because at times she’s really got on my tits. At least in this ep, the focus was firmly on the Doctor and was happy to stay that way. After all, he’s the reason I watch - he’s the alien, the interesting one, and it’s always going to be that way. Idris was at times a little over-played, but mostly convincing and certainly a welcome addition to the episode (and by an Oldham lass, none the less!). At just the right times, she was heart-wrenchingly aloof to the tiny things, practical and far-reaching, transcendental and omnipotent. But when it came to the small things - the words - she found it the hardest thing in the universe. Welcome to the human race, love.

Dialogue was spiffy and excellent - Eleven even came out with a direct quote from Ten: ‘Basically - run!’ His explanation of his Calm Malfunction: ‘I’m a mad man with a box - without a box!’ was just brilliant, and then at the end, Neil Gaiman rounds it all off with the throwaway line about going to the Eye of Orion for some peace and quiet - nice.

We do get a tiny hint, a niggling quote about the future: :the only water in the forest is the river.’ This seemed to go by the way in later eps, as it was never referred to again - but then, it wasn’t needed.

And so, all in all, I have to say this was one of my favourite episodes of the series. It demonstrated what the Beeb can do with it lets people writes its scripts for entertainment value - before being vetted by the Tormenting, Capricious God Who Is Stephen Moffat. It also goes to show that, when Matt Smith is given proper drah-ma, Doctor Who style, he can handle it easily and it brings out the best in him - and his audience. He deserves much more than some of the scripts they’ve given him, and I for one do not want Matt Smith to go. He’s not yet had his finest hour, but 5x11, 6x04, and Christmas 2010 are very, very close. No matter what happens in the next few hours, when 6x12 airs, I’ll still be wishing he could stay for another few years. Rumour has it that series seven has been pushed back to the tail-end of 2012. I’m not happy about that - but I am happy that we’ll actually get a series seven, and of the rumours surrounding that magical year 2013. Yes, the 50th anniversary of that national institution that is Doctor Who itself. Think of the possibilities...

Peach and lube, people. Peach and frelling lube.

Tags:
BBC ~ Doctor Who ~ Matt Smith ~ TARDIS

Torchwood 4

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!
Here be Torchwood 4x10 SPOILERS!


Where do I start? Hmm... First things first.

Hands up all those who were really really nervous about Starz Network paying for this series of Torchwood? I must admit, I was a bit sceptical. And then I saw the opening episode.

True, it was more of an introduction to the concept of Torchwood than an actual full-on episode, and it wasn’t anywhere near the standard of usual Torchwoodery... but I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and go with it. Subsequent episodes got better and better - and then I got my miracle:

All the way through series one, two and especially three, I tolerated Gwen Cooper. She wasn’t always annoying; she had a few moments where I almost got to like her. And then the writers would make her do something that made me wish she’d died instead of Suzie - or Owen, or Tosh, or just about anyone. Her compassion came over wrong - I began to dislike her.

And then we had series four.

During the first couple of episodes I thought, hang on, she’s not so annoying right now. She hasn’t been the whole time. And just about the third episode I thought, blimey, she’s actually a character I actively like. And I mean LIKE. Not as much as Jack, but hey, that’s impossible. I actually didn’t want her to die in a fire, or get mowed down by a dalek, or eaten by a rabid bugblatter beast from Traal. And from there she just got better and better. Truly miraculous.

Now I have a few theories about this. The first goes, rather predictably, that now that RTD is no longer writing the episodes, the character has to act like every other in terms of pulling their weight within the dynamic of the team - they no longer have a free pass to hang about being The Speyshall One. Now they have to actually do something that makes a fandom / casual watcher / audience member want them to be there (or, in case of recurring villains, make everyone love to hate them). The second theory, and probably a much more plausible one, is that the character of Gwen was now being written by a woman. A woman who’s written for shitloads of other women in TV. Now I’m not exactly sure what difference that makes, but whatever it was, it was a big one. What do I take from this? That RTD doesn’t write women very well? Or it needed a female American scriptwriter to give Gwen a proper character? Who knows.

Funny I should put it like that. I did like the many little nods to the Doctor throughout the series. From Jack going a bit misty-eyed about telling Angelo about the Doctor and his companions to mentioning Silurians, there were a few tiny touches I liked - even the ubiquitous ‘What? What? What?’ got in there. Coincidence? Or a fun way to remind everyone that this was a finale that had another series coming? (Note - we can hope there’s another series coming. I haven’t looked but no news has been brought to my attention on that point. I really need to spend a day on Tinternet. You see how going abroad screws up your routine?)

An honourable mention must go to Kai Owen - he went with the lines, he did them well, and he will always be a favourite of mine. I’m so glad he wasn’t side-lined completely. We saw enough of him to make me happy.

Jack. We love Jack, that goes without saying. But put him in a room with a sci-fi legend like Bill Pullman and you have a very interesting chill to the room. Bill Pullman does excellent work, and this time he really made my flesh crawl. Bloody excellent. Even his end was enough to make me want to stab him in the eye. The new cast and crew were tolerable at first, and better as it went on. We lost people, yes, but it was part of the story, not just to shock - although they did that too. And talking of shocking - it was about time Jack got his end away. He did mention fallen comrades and previous relationships (was I the only one who liked that he talked about Ianto - twice?), and he did the Jack thing and helped himself wherever he wanted. And that’s why we like him.

And talking of guest stars - whoa! Nana Visitor and John de Lancie? Are you shitting me? I nearly died of happiness fangirl overload when Major Kira and Q appeared. Both characters shamefully underused but brilliantly cast. I’ll never agree with what happened to them both, but that’s just a fangirl throwing her toys out of the pram because what happened to her favourites was not what she wanted personally. They’re both still fab - who else could be the balls-out granddaughter, or running the bloody CIA? Suffice to say, I’m sighing rather happily right now.

In a nutshell - I liked it. It took time to get going, that’s for damn sure, but it got there in the end. It’s even eclipsed the current series of Doctor bloody Who in my priority stakes - but that’s a discussion for another day. Overall, it did the job. It was business as usual at the Torchwood Institute, and whether moaning anti-Americans liked it or not, it did exactly what Hot Rod Cow’s been doing for the past three series. The only gripe I had was that there were no aliens. Perhaps now that this series has paved the way for more coverage in the US, and hopefully, more of a budget and a need for a series five, we might get them. After all, no matter what Gwen says, it’s the alienness of the show that drew me, and that’s what I was waiting for. No, I didn’t get it - throwaway lines about alien technology and futures, other stars, other adventures with the Doctor only go so far. Now the US has had this primer, it’s time to bring in the aliens.

That’s it, I’m done. Time to catch up on Doctor bloody Who with tea and hope that we’re not about to be swamped in more Amy-appreciation.

Peach and lube, people. Especially you, John Barrowman.

Tags:
Torchwood ~ John Barrowman ~ Doctor Who ~ Starz

Day trippin’

Sunday - land in Blighty, then go to a barbecue, then stay at sister’s. Monday - go to Cornwall, stay over in a (shitty) Travelodge, do some Devon on Tuesday, then kip at other sister’s. Wednesday - go to Granny Weatherwax’s for’t night, back to sister’s Thursday long enough for a change clothes and pick up another one before going on to Blackpool. Stay over in another really shitty Travelodge, do the beachfront, buy the tat, get rained on, tits near frozen off, then jump in the car and make it to London. Get changed, get to the Wyndham Theatre in Leicester Square to watch Catherine Tate and David Tennant in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, *, have a bloody good time, have your sister flag down the only taxi in London that has a nice cabbie, get back to the Premier Inn (not shitty at all), open your MacBook Air and start typing - with a mojito in one hand and the other one over my ear. Yeah yeah, I know - maybe I just have three hands.

* Further to ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, I have to say it was ace - they managed to get much more visual humour into it than the script called for, but I could see ol’ Bill approving of such visual gags and cheap stunts to make the play go faster. For the people who actually understood the English, it was bloody funny (especially the bloke who played the Captain of the Watch); for those who struggled, there was the silent fun of watching David Tennant and Catherine Tate go through their roles with fun, gusto, and obvious enjoyment. By the way they were grinning as they bowed at the end, I’d say every single person in that production was laughing their bloody socks off on the inside.

Actually, the holiday as a whole has been a lot of fun. Unimaginable amounts of hilarity and relaxation have ensued (both separately and together), and Blighty has been much easier on the soul this time than the last - mainly due to’t fact that it’s now May and not bloody freezing December.

So it’s now Sunday night and I’ve booked in for my return flight via Cathay. Such nice chaps and ladies (“laydeeez!”). Except for the fact that, during my flight here, they woke me up for food. Woke me up! I know! You’re sitting there right now, throwing your hands up in the air and exclaiming: “Woke you up, you say! Bloody hell-fire! How dare they!” etc. However, it were a good job they did, cos I was proper starving. Anyway, I’m hoping for an ok flight back - the usual twelve-to-fourteen hours int air, coupled with me trying to stay asleep long enough to avoid the crying children and wandering adults. At least I have my iPhone (and iPod function) to keep me comfortably numb.

And so to Sunday: Doctor bloody Who exhibitions in Olympia 2, car journeys, spot-the-wanker-driver competitions, etc. Fun, fun, fun - in the sun, sun, sun - especially as I’ve now amassed a total of four new tea mugs for my cupboard for when I return home (Details to follow. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you).


And here we are: Sunday night - telly, vodka, all those good things. After a movie and some amusement, I have to say I’ve enjoyed both Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson in ‘How To Train Your Dragon’, and copious amounts of vodka. I liked the movie; I laughed, I pointed, I enjoyed guessing the voices. I have two quibbles; one, that the dragon in question, ‘Toothless’, was just a pet and not a friend, and two, that the mighty David Tennant was so criminally under-used. I was greatly amused by the fact that the ‘elders’ (i.e., people who know better; the stronger, harder, much-feared and much-revered ones) sported Scottish voices, whilst the noobs, annoying oiks and kids who needed training had American ones. Nice.


Anyway, a good time was had by all, and the accompanying pizza weren’t bad, neither.


Think that’s about it. Time for bed, said Zebedee.

Tags:
holiday ~ Doctor Who ~ Shakespeare ~ David Tennant

You can never go home again

Well, you can. Of course you can. But it’s never the same. I got on a plane and came back to Blighty for a bit - birthdays of relatives, break from the routine, the whole job-lot - and while everything’s the same, it isn’t.

Cornwall. Never been to Cornwall before. Went yesterday and stayed over. It was alright. A lot of fun on the road trip to get there - and the associated places of interest, both near and far-flung. Corfe Castle and the surrounding village still looks like a place I could live for a bit. Car number plates (the ‘new’ ones) - still can’t get my head round them. I’ve decided to consign that whole mess to the ‘doesn’t matter whether I get it or not, so just accept it and move on’ bin. Oh yes.

Caught the sun today - yay! Real, actual, direct sunshine turning my face a different colour. Bloody hell, I’ve missed that. Not that Hong Kong isn’t bright - it just isn’t the same. Green fields, trees, sheep - horses - horses - and shitloads of stuff that I’d forgotten about. Sometimes, moving back to England wouldn’t be so bad. And sometimes it would.

Caught up with Doctor bloody Who and all that that means. And a place in the winter, for dignity. Or not - as it seems The God Who Is Stephen Moffat kind of let me down a bit with his season six opening two-parter. Not saying it was bad - it just wasn’t as explained or fleshed-out as much as it could have been.

That’s about it - just to let the masses know that reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated and I will be back to blog more as soon as I know what day I’m on. Time’s different on different continents, dontchaknow - and I can never keep up. It’s ok, though. It’s all wibbly-wobbly.


Soopytwist.

Sherlock and Watson vs Doctor Ten?

Ok, not really a straight versus, more of a working together. Kind of. Yes, it’s another fic. I know, it’s another Doctor Who fic, but this is my first (and only) Sherlock (2010) fic - if you don’t count the one I did for Jeremy Brett when I was about nine years old.

Off we go:


“The Adventure of the Missing Candlestick”
Rating: Rated K+ for use of weapons and the occasional naughty word.
Summary:
Sherlock and Watson miss some finding but find something missing - after they bump into a rather weird doctor who insists he’s from outside the EU.
Disclaimer:
I do not own Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson (past or present), Doctor bloody Who, the BBC, or in fact owt but the MacBook Air I typed this on. All I hope to gain from this is a single reader who thinks reading this is a better use of their time than watching repeats on telly. Which, obviously, you can’t bank.

Linky-link-link:




Also posted at An Archive Of Our Own because they don’t reformat it a year later without bloody telling you.

And that shallot. Onion. Off to finish some icons.


Tags:
~ fan-fic ~ Doctor Who ~ Sherlock

Christmas 2010 - Doctor Who style

So I was about to go off on one regarding the 2010 Doctor Who Christmas Special before - but ran out of space. Well, ran out of a will to put every single Doctor Who thought in one post, is more like it. Anyway, here we go - and yes, it may well be spoilery.

Danger! Danger! Spoilers, Will Robinson! Do not read this post if you have not yet seen the 2010 Christmas Special!



So, easy start then: I loved it. Not a lot could detract from the excitement and sheer whacky good fun of Eleven running up and down, breaking laws of being a Timelord and basically making Christmas a bloody good time on telly. I loved the fish, the timey-wimey slant, the little quirky jokes and the fact that it didn’t have a Hollywood ending. Woah, let’s back up and qualify all that.

Breaking Laws of Being a Timelord:

“Crossing into established events is strictly forbidden. Except for cheap tricks.”

Yes. Ten said it, all incarnations of the Doctor know it, but Eleven decides to conveniently subvert his own ideas of what’s ok and what’s not and simply go back and rewrite Kazran’s memory. Nice. He did it with style, to be sure, and no doubt he can justify this to himself by weighing up the amount of ripples made to the space-time continuum as a whole versus four thousand lives on a spaceship that hadn’t yet died (except, fourth-dimensionally speaking, they had already not yet will have died). Quick question - was it the 4,000-odd people on the ship, or the fact that his two friends were aboard - and he had put them there as part of some honeymoon thing? And I noticed he referred to the people on the spaceship. I think I’m right in saying not once did he say he wasn’t going to let the ship crash because his Companion(s) was/were on it. Hmm. Anyway, as a catalyst, the spaceship plot was a good idea - and it did keep Amy out of the way, so I was particularly glad about that. I think he gets away with it. (And I’m reliably informed that Amy and Rory in outfits was rather like Rodney and Cassandra in ‘Only Fools And Horses’.)

Fish:

“It’s going to eat us!”
“Well perhaps we’ll eat it - but I don’t like the odds!”

From fish using fog to swim in the air, to the female shark out to lunch, it was all typical Doctor Who - take the norm and skew it just enough to make it cool, and slap on some skience to make it passably believable. Or, in a word, ace. We know fish, we know sharks, we can relate to them. Put them in the hands of Stephen Moffat and you get anarchy in the physics classroom that amounts to excellence in the ideas department. Weaving all that around the delta-wave patterns of some bird singing her Welsh heart out and you have a heart-warming tale of consideration. But not too thickly spread. Again, good stuff.

Dialogue:

“Father Christmas. Santa Claus. Or, as I’ve always known him: Jeff.”

Oh, it was rich. It was snappy. It was Stephen Moffat writing Eleven at his best - respectively. Just sheer bloody fun. I doubt there was a sentence in there that Mr Moffat didn’t pore over and adjust twenty times to make it just that little bit more amusing (or was gazumped by Matt Smith ad-libbing, perhaps). As a script, it was genius. As a mechanism to show how fab the Doctor can be when he’s not hindered by an annoying Companion, it did very, very well. No words can describe how much fun it is to listen to Matt Smith going off on one as if he’s the victim of the universe’s largest sugar rush, and yet coming off like some absent-minded professor who’s just dying to show something fab to his class because they’ll like it. Some of my favourite lines:

“A big flashy-lighty thing, that’s what brought me here. Big flashy-lighty things have got me written all over them. Well actually, give me Time. And a crayon.”

Doctor: “Clever old Mrs Manto - she only went and won the lottery.”
Kazran: “There isn’t any lottery.”
Doctor: “I know! What a woman!”

“Do you know, there’s a thing called a Face Spider. It’s just like a tiny baby’s head with spider legs and it specifically evolved to scuttle up the backs of bedroom cupboards. Which… yeah, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned.”

And then the follow-up gag which wins above all others, simply for the way Matt Smith delivers the fatal line:

Kazran: “Are there any Face Spiders in here?”
Doctor: “Nah, not at this time of night. They’ll all be sleeping in your mattress.”

And then there was the one that made me go out and make a t-shirt because I loved it so much:

“What do you call it if you don’t have any feet… and you’re taking a run-up?”

And little in-jokes, perhaps regarding a certain other Timelord bird (Timelady?):

Kazran: “I kiss her now?”
Doctor: “Trust me, it’s this or go to you room and design a new kind of screwdriver. Don’t make my mistakes.”

Even the lines that were perfectly ordinary get turned into a prompt for out-and-out laughter when they are spewed from the Doctor’s mouth:

“Marilyn! Get your coat!”

Timey-wimey:

“People think that Time is a linear progression from one thing to another, when in fact it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, uhm, stuff.”

Hard to forget those words. Said by Ten, written by Stephen Moffat. Of course. Which is what Stephen Moffat does best - playing with Time. He can jump backwards and forwards, he can write stories that rely on the wibbly-wobbliness of Time to work - with his stories, Time isn’t so much a backdrop for the Doctor, it’s another character in the play. As it should be, with someone who fannies about in the fourth dimension for fun. So many of the Doctor’s stories forget he’s a time traveller, once the actual landing has taken place. It’s a real treat to get Moffat screwing with timelines and using Time to the story’s advantage, and I hope he has more of these ideas on his laptop.

This is not the Hollywood ending you’re looking for:

The Doctor let her die. He did. Because there was nothing he could do? No - he didn’t even ask, didn’t even check. Because it was the right thing to do? Perhaps. From someone’s point of view, somewhere. Then again, ‘many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.’ (Thanks, Ben.) We’ll never know exactly why he didn’t bother to try and help Abigail - but perhaps we don’t need to. It’s One Of Those Times. It needed to be left. And anyway, he gave her a good way to go. How many other people can get back in touch with a very close friend to ride a shark-cab on their last day? Not bad.

I think I’m all done. (Except for - woah woah woah, Eleven - isomorphic controls? Didn't the Master use them on his laser screwdriver? Just asking...) All I can say is, this was a great episode and it more than made up for the rather lacking latter half of series five. I can only hope that series six is as good.

That’s shallot. Onion. I’m off. Probably back soon in my usual vitriolic mood.

But for now - peach and lube, people. Peach and frelling lube.



Tags:
~ Doctor Who ~ BBC ~ David Tennant ~ Matt Smith ~ Stephen Moffat

Matt Smith - the ultimate weigh-in!


Yes, it’s about time I went off on one regarding Matt Smith and Doctor bloody Who in general. As you’re probably aware, I thought Five was my Doctor (blame my childhood) until David Tennant came along. I kind of like Christopher Eccleston, but seeing as he’s my uncle in disguise, I can’t watch him without waiting for him to say ‘Aliens? What a load of bollocks’, etc. Kind of like watching Sean Bean in an American film and finding he breaks the spell of disbelief - because he’s proper English and just not buying into any hype or shite about magical stuff. Ahem.

Anyway, David Tennant was huge for me. Wait, let me rephrase that - David Tennant was a bloody excellent Doctor Ten. He was everything he needed to be and more - and it was amazing to watch him go through the angst and cheeky fun. Just fucking ace.

So when it was announced he was leaving, I was a little upset. But then, all good things come to an end - and, considering he is the Doctor and he does travel in time and space, technically Ten could always be riding around somewhere. I mean, just because he’s gone in his personal timeline, doesn’t mean he’s not going to show up in ours. He might pop up next year for the Olympics, for example.

Anyway - Matt Smith. So he turned up yelling ‘Geronimo!’ (worst catch-phrase ever) and promptly grew a bowtie and an Old Skool Doctor quirkiness. Not in the same way that David Tennant is quirky, but definitely Keith-Richards-Patrick-Troughton-drunken-master quirky fun. And he can deliver lines. Just the way he gave us ‘Amelia… Pond’ had me in stitches, and his all-elbows finnicky-fingers, coupled with his manic gibbering that carefully conceals his real agenda, had me intrigued. Where Doctor Ten would bluster and confidently gabble his way past people with facts and gumption, Eleven seems to apologetically squeak through by being a thousand times more lost than anyone else could ever hope to be. And it works. And so, too, do his elbows.

I grew to like Matt Smith, and he’s now eclipsed Five as my second favourite Doctor. He may never overtake Ten, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of.

Unfortunately, as writers had their turn at series five, some episodes fell short of the usual Doctor-story standard - most notably ‘The Vampires of Venice’, a woefully lacking affair (sorry, Toby Whithouse, if they screwed with your script). In fact, I only kept about five of the series’ episodes to watch again. The absolute stand-out amazing wonder for me was ‘The Lodger’, where Eleven takes it upon himself to lodge in Matey-From-Gavin-And-Stacey’s spare room and be as Doctorish as he possibly can. Which was ace. The script was sharp, the fun and adventure was back, but - dare I admit it - the reason it was so good was because Amy was somewhere else.

When little Amelia Pond first sat on the suitcase waiting for her raggedy Doctor, I liked the little girl. Which is a lot, coming from me. I teach small kids and I scrub myself with Dettol and a wire brush afterwards, so me appreciating a monster like that was a big thing. And then she grew up, and after the first few episodes she began to get on my nerves just a little. Then she did the Predictable and Stupid Move and I threw my hands in the air. As usual, the female Companion has to throw herself at the Doctor, as if (1) he would seriously go for an alien something less than 1/40th his age, and (2) that was anything to do with why he brought her along in the first place. I mean, come on, people - I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again. Why does the (New Who) Companion always have to fall in luuuurve with the Doctor? Why is it never his TARDIS, or just the life of travelling with him? That was why I loved Donna Noble so much - she was there for the fun, not some crappy idea of alien romance. Yet another Companion with a crush on the Doctor? Oh puh-leaze.

For me, the stories were a little ho-hum but I could have lived with that if only Amy weren’t being annoying in nearly every scene she was in. I’m not saying the actress didn’t do a good job - I’m sure I’d like her in anything else she does - but the character of Amy, and that again everything revolved around the Companion as we got swept along to the series finale, kind of got a little old and tired before we’d even got there. They screwed over Donna so badly it nearly made my head explode, and then we get RTD going batshit-desperate and throwing everything he had at the Regeneration Finale. He was allowed to do that, of course he was - it was his show. If he wanted balls-to-the-wall Tinkerbell Jesus bollocks going on, then fine. (But perhaps, a year later, if he’d seen the season five finale of Supernatural, he might have appreciated how you can finish a series, a season, and even a five-year-arc without needing to go batshit-crazypants-overboard on jamming in too much story, cutesy, angst or even drah-ma. Just saying.)

Anyway, back to Matt Smith. He’s ace. He’s a great Eleven. I just hope he stays for a few more years and we get more Stephen Moffat and Gareth Roberts scripts. Which brings me to Stephen Moffat. New showrunner, new BMOC - apparently. And yet, he ‘joked’ about being ‘allowed’ to write the Christmas 2010 special. Well if you value your Doctor Who franchise and want to keep it going, You People at the Beeb, you’ll let Mr Moffat write 90% of series six, or there may be a tad fewer viewers bothering to tune in. ‘The Eleventh Hour’ (pretty damn good) and ‘The Beast Below’ (also pretty damn good) were written by Stephen Moffat, and ‘Victory of the Daleks’ was brought to us by Mark Gatiss (now more commonly known as Mycroft Holmes and co-creator/writer, along with Stephen Moffat, of the achingly excellent Sherlock mini-mini-series - but more on that another day). All good episodes. ‘The Time of Angels’ and ‘Flesh and Stone’, the return of the ridiculously successful Weeping Angels monsters from series three, were pretty good episodes but Amy was already becoming very annoying for me. ‘Vampires of Venice’ was, as I’ve already said, weak, and ‘Amy’s Choice’ was about as much fun as toothache and pretty much the low point of the series. (Sorry, Simon Nye - just not my thing.)

‘The Hungry Earth’ and ‘Cold Blood’ two-parter was pretty good - very Doctor Who in its aliens and mysteries and families and people trying not to be people by doing exactly what the Doctor told them not to. Good performances and a pretty good script. I liked Meera Syal and thought she could have replaced Amy in the TARDIS. But that’s just me.

‘Vincent and the Doctor’ had all the hallmarks of a great episode and it delivered on many levels - not surprisingly, as it was written by Richard Curtis. He hasn’t lost it. But the next episode, ‘The Lodger’, is my all-time favourite Doctor Eleven episode - I think. Thank you thank you thank you, Gareth Roberts. He also gave us ‘The Shakespeare Code’ from series three, and ‘The Unicorn And The Wasp’ from series four. His only slight bump was ‘Planet of the Dead’, but that’s allowed.

Anyway, from there we went straight into the two-part series finale, ‘The Pandorica Opens’ and ‘The Big Bang’. As I remember it, I found the idea of Evil League of Evil, Doctor Who style, ensnaring the Doctor in his own private prison refreshing and different. It made sense once you thought back, and it was fun to see so many villains sharing the screen. Let’s not forget, we have shiny new Proper Daleks again now, and the host of other bad guys just made me titter. It was good Saturday night telly. ‘The Big Bang’, and again, everything hinging on Amy, was a bit of a strain for me, but it did end the series ok.

What I’ve learnt from this is that all episodes are passable when Amy is elsewhere (although bumbling Rory would get annoying if there were no-one more annoying to distract me), and Stephen Moffat writes Doctor Eleven better that anyone else alive. Which brings me to the Christmas 2010 special.

Or it would do, if I didn’t realise this has already been about 1,000 words too long. So I’ll say thanks for bothering to reach this far, and I’ll be back very soon with my take on the Christmas 2010 special. Hopefully, some time before Christmas 2011.

Peach and lube, people.

Tags:
~ Doctor Who ~ BBC ~ David Tennant ~ Matt Smith ~ Stephen Moffat