The Cloven Hoof
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23 September 2015 at 00:35 #43269
Anonymous @
“people are paid to write lots and lots of posts BTL”
(Good to see you back and yes there are loads of comments -one of which is my rambling on in quite prosaic terms about Gretchen, Odin and how all 12 Doctors are present -and unified- during the e-lectric gee-tar fair accompanied by tank. Awesome! Anyway ’nuff about my opinions 🙂 )
Now I must ask this probably stoopid question what is BTL? @scaryb mentioned this above in reference to the Graun area?
Certainly there was negativity which is why like Mr Blenkinsop, I love this home.
There were many back- handed compliments which began with: “a great episode and SO much better than last season and the two seasons before with: Moffat. [da dum…] This episode suggests we’re back to the good ol’ days like RTD with some exciting openers and lots of action rather than the cerebral indulgent behaviour of the past few years.” etc etc.
But yes @blenkinsopthebrave mentioned that he need never return to that ‘place’ as we have our little home here -certainly with mild disagreements such as @denvaldron outlined, and that’s fine because there’s validity and sensitivity in good evidenced debate. We can’t all agree (it would be great if we could, but it would be disingenuous).
I’ll pop over to the music thread for your song? <<*\*>>
Kindest, puro
23 September 2015 at 03:31 #43279@whisht good to have you back. I suspect that some of the Who haters are “moffbots” or to be more accurate “murdochbots” attacking anything BBC. I was telling my SO last night about my description of keyboard warriors working in a damp dark cellar. He said he pictured them in a gleaming office with a team of others, all collecting their pay checks on the way out.
@Purofilion BTL refers to Below the Line, the comments in other, perhaps more meaningful words. It was lazy typing on my part last night.
cheers
Janette
23 September 2015 at 08:48 #43290@janetteb thank you for supplying that. No. You’re not lazy. Not you and not ever.
I would say there are lazy ppl here -a few, not many and by lazy I probably mean those who state a theory and then wait. Wait for a ‘like’ in it’s own way and then add more theories. There’s maybe one or two because we’re lucky on this Forum.
For me, because basically I’m theory-less, 🙂 I like to discuss the mood and flavour of an episode, make (pretty obvious) observations or read what others have to say. Without that, the site has little meaning. Listening to Maria (or Margaret) Kostova on radio and Matthew Pearl it was interesting listening to their attitudes about youtubers, twitterers and those on forums who don’t exist to share. They may be passionate about a theory but are disinterested in really paying attention to those around them and so don’t really develop their ideas beyond a pre-determined state. I guess, whilst the net has ‘playing with others’ issues -privacy, anonymity etc, it does mean the “development of ideas is at a working horizon of developmental frenzy.” (Pearl)
I like that concept -that thru sharing, we all get better: wiser, funnier, happier, more learned etc…. Our optimum state of being has improved.
And most ppl here -when I look back at conversations, do specifically refer to others which helps that broadening 🙂
This is a somewhat weird time to be mentioning this because we’ve all contributed to the first episode and I don’t imagine it will quiet down any time soon -but an observation nonetheless.
23 September 2015 at 08:55 #43291LOL to Moffbots and Murdochbots though if you saw the Q&A with Shorten at Ballarat (the home of rebellion) there was quite a bit of support for independence from the mainstream papers and channels -but some tweeters where all aghast at the “foul unions who are communist fascists” etc etc 🙂
23 September 2015 at 09:10 #43292Hi guys, has anybody heard about this? It’s from the company that distribute the action figures in the UK.
http://www.character-online.com/doctorwhoannoucement/
23 September 2015 at 12:46 #43295@Purofilion
I like that concept -that thru sharing, we all get better: wiser, funnier, happier, more learned etc…. Our optimum state of being has improved.
You worded that beautifully. I certainly feel as though this forum has made me wiser and happier. I have gained so much out of the discussions. Long may it continue to enrich the lives of all who participate.
I did not know that Shorten was in Ballarat, indeed the home of rebellion. Maybe I can blame my contrariness on my place of birth. According to family legend we had an ancestor who was involved in the rebellion but that doesn’t quite track with the family records. My ancestors were later rebels, unionists and free thinkers. Maybe it was something in the water..
Cheers
Janette
2 October 2015 at 06:08 #43926Aw, thank you!
I’m sorry I responded so late -I must have missed the comment above about you having ancestors involved in the Rebellion! How exciting!
My parents, as I may have mentioned, skipped the oncoming storm of Communists, by leaving Prague one morning armed with a pistol, a loaf of rye and a large salami.
They walked over the mountains a la The Sound of Music and unlike our unions supported capitalism and the Great God Economy saying things such as “Are we paid too much? Oh no, we are paid exactly what the Market can bear”. This is Republican thinking too and I’m sure, that had my parents lived in the States, they would have voted to the Right.”
Continuing from The Witch’s Familiar, I was thinking, in line with your book (!), that you could write about the Top 10 Doctor Who Enemies: 10: Sontarans 9: the G.I. etc….with perhaps Daleks as number 1 and in 2nd place, The Weeping Angels. Obviously the Cybermen would be near the top of the list too.
🙂
2 October 2015 at 06:15 #43928@purofilion Hmmm top ten enemies? I think I’d have to think of something interesting to say about them. Might be good for a blog post. I’ll think about it. For enemies, I think two big criteria – 1) Ability to achieve the effect; 2) Some existential/thematic/mythic quality.
2 October 2015 at 06:24 #43929I mean seriously, what makes a good Doctor Who villain?
2 October 2015 at 06:42 #43930Well, that is an excellent question. Having read the info @jphamlore linked to, I think the old Daleks (where apparently one could creep up on them from behind and possibly disable them) were not that scary -but that’s relative of course.
I would imagine Weeping Angels as scary -a thing which is quantum locked (I say this as if I truly know what quantum locked is -and I do, but I glean this knowledge from what I’ve read in The New York Times supplements 🙂 ) has a ferocious power. If it eats your existence than this is worse than dead. Worse than being transferred back to 1920’s New York -the Ponds were ‘translated’ to the pre-Depression period? If so, they may well have encountered the NY Daleks with the pig men. Now, they were awful enemies: chiefly because of the pig heads. Gawd, that was a shocking 2 parter. Poor Martha.
Frankly, anything under the bed is pretty bad by my standards including cockroaches and Australian insects like green ants which hide near swimming pools. Also foot-grabbers.
Right: somewhat off topic there.
There may be an enemy, which, whilst beautifully decorated and sensibly apparelled, may talk you to death and force you to listen. This is the opposite of the Weeping Angels, in one way, and could be quite devastating.
Whilst the Cybermen are terrifying at least their emotions are tuned out. Should they be suffering ‘with emotions’ and walking in circles asking for their mothers, I would be horrified: such things are personally terrifying to me.
This suggests that certain people have their own ‘room’ (referring to The God Complex) wherein their most frightening enemy resides.
I don’t mind the Sontarans too much. For starters, they’re about my own height. Also, they have an ‘off switch’. God, anything with an off-switch is bloody awesome.
2 October 2015 at 06:47 #43931My own existential fear is actually the concept ‘eternity’. I do not know why. People dream about things under the bed. As a child my fear was living in the knowledge that one could not stop living.
Even in death. Honestly, even writing this gives me the willies. I truly fear this concept. I find that by simply trying not to think about it helps. Of course “pink elephants” and all that.
And yours? Or, if that’s too personal a question, simply ignore!
I think I have to sleep now. But, not forever (“god, stop thinking about that”) Snaps rubber band.
2 October 2015 at 07:15 #43933I should sleep on it too.
2 October 2015 at 07:52 #43935I don’t know that it’s simply just fear. But there has to be an underlying archetypal notion.
For the Daleks, well… They’re Nazi’s. Literally. They were created as obvious space Nazi’s in 1963, creatures of hate, the ultimate supremacists, plotting genocide at any cost. What’s kept the Daleks going is the purity of their hatred.
For the Cybermen – it’s the loss of humanity, of human essence replaced. And probably cheap as hell, at least the classic series versions.
The Master – easy, the Dark mirror of the Doctor.
The Rani – a less successfully defined Dark mirror.
The Silence – a primordial terror. Similar to the Angels. Both of them represent the thing that gets you when you’re not looking, and the only way to keep it at bay is to watch it. They’re crystallized fears of the unknown.
The Sontarans – Abstract, but they’re the forever war, the eternal cold war, the military ethos distilled. They’re almost nuanced in their concept. Also, costumes are easy to fabricate, and allow freedom and visibility to the actors.
The Yeti – the terror of animalistic power, really, they’re like grizzly bears.
Are there even ten? Let’s see: Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, Master, Silence, Weeping Angels… then the pickings thin out rapidly. ‘So so’ would be the Yeti, Great Intelligence, Ice Warriors, Rani, at least in terms of repeat appearances. How about that kid in the gas mask with Ecclestone – majorly hard to forget.
In terms of sheer power – The Beast, Sutekh of the Osirans, the Fendah, the Daemons, the Toymaker.
2 October 2015 at 20:20 #43941Hi @denvaldron and @Purofilion – In terms of ‘monsters’ (though ‘villains’ is subtly different) I remember having fun with @rob in coming up with new ones.
I think (without thinking deeply) what makes a good villain or monster is a fear that children and adults share – because the fears of the adults were the same ones they had as kids.
So – monsters that resonate may be the ones that kids can relate to. Here’s what I said before on this (though I’m not suggesting that that means I’m right! ;¬) )
For me the Daleks aren’t scary anymore (they fail too often and to be truly scary for me it has to be total and destructive and having thousands of them reduces this). Hence why I fancifull suggested these as horrible enemies.
Weeping Angels is (I think) also similar to a kid’s game – a game of ‘tag’ where if you blink I can move.
The other monsters that resonate are those that (perhaps) adults fear more – those who have no emotion, and those who have too much.
Sociopaths(?) and bigots.I’m entirely ignoring the ‘gloopy’ monster/villains as its just “ewwwwww urghh”.
3 October 2015 at 01:11 #43945Xcellent! I read those and didn’t realise I was re-starting another conversation. Sorry about that.
Yes, I agree, as with my fear of eternity (yeah, I know ‘meh’) it worked as a child and now, well, it’s worse but it’s hardly doable.
But someone who talks your ear off -or your head of, is …to me, freakish.
One doesn’t have to look very far. Pretty simple to create.
3 October 2015 at 03:33 #43955@whisht @denvaldron and @Purofilion
I think the scariest “monster” ever in Dr Who were the vashta nerada from Silence in the Library, completely silent, absolutely deadly and hiding in books. They could not be fought and they could not be reasoned with. It was years before our eldest would watch that two parter and I understand why. Overexposure seems to lesson the fear factor of a enemy or monster. The dakeks, cybermen, sontarons and mixmaster are now all too familiar to be properly scary. The weeping angels became less frightening the more we saw of them. Fear arises from the sense of dis-empowerment, the “how will they/we survive” question.
Cheers
Janette
3 October 2015 at 05:36 #43958@purofilion My own existential fear is actually the concept ‘eternity’. . . the knowledge that one could not stop living. Even in death. Honestly, even writing this gives me the willies. I truly fear this concept. I find that by simply trying not to think about it helps. . . And yours?
I don’t know if this is an existential fear — probably: but dead stuff that continues moving (whether truly sentient or not — zombies as ridiculously fast-moving cannibals) or starts moving (the refrigerator sings Verdi, a tree sits down on the curb). The Uncanny, I guess (which means, what? The unknown, unknowable, unknowing?). Blood freezes; that can’t be!
Also — big, raw, physical violence, the sight of, but even more, the sounds (only heard, so far, in movies). I went out to the lobby when that guy in Bonnie and Clyde got part of his head shot away and died slowly and audibly. Same near the end of an Italian film when the left-wing prisoner had his head repeatedly bashed against the stone wall by his Fascist murderers. I shut my eyes, but the sounds were worse than the visuals. My sister and I both inherited very acute hearing from our father; just another part of how cranky he could be, I think now.
None of this is useful for DW villains; the best TV monster, I think, were the Buffy weird guys with their mummy man in “Hush” — horrible in a thrilling way, because I was also admiring how wonderfully effective they’d been made.
4 October 2015 at 21:39 #44058NASA has released a load of Apollo images. They are incredible. Be awed
7 October 2015 at 04:39 #44243I have expounded upon my Clara theory in a few differnet posts here with bits and pieces of information here and there. If anyone is interested in read my theory with all the information relating to it that I’ve colleted so far, then feel free to pop on over to my newly created blog (on Google+) and have a read. Feel free to leave a comment if you so desire.
http://martinstenersen.blogspot.co.nz/2015/10/a-crazy-clara-theory.html
8 October 2015 at 18:12 #44328On successful monsters, I’m still kicking that one around. Let’s take Daleks. Why were Daleks successful? Why are Daleks successful now? Is it still the same reasons? Let me try and list them out:
1) Daleks were a ‘kinetic’ monster – that is, in an era when most monsters moved slowly, when they plodded forward carefully, when they swung widedly and loosely, when they were clearly men in suits and the men had to move carefully and vaguely because they could hardly see out of heavy costumes… Daleks were fast, gliding around smoothly at will, they were precise in swinging their guns and eyestalks, they did not roar or mumble but screech in precise ways. They were extraordinarily lively, particularly for the limitations of black and white TV. That probably expired as costumes and costume technology got better – but a good kinetic monster design held its popularity for a long time.
2) They were physically scary – at the time – they were clearly highly stylized individual versions of Tanks, with Turrets, Chassis, Guns. WWII was recent, the Korean and Suez conflicts were even more recent, the cold war with its massed waiting tank armies was even more recent. The Tank was the most terrifying land weapon around, and the Daleks were an individualized, one man, sci fi version. They also looked completely unlike a man in the suit. They lacked human features altogether, and so headed straight to uncanny valley. That’s much less effective these days, although their history allows them to retain some of it.
3) They were not scary! This is sort of a counterintuitive one. But part of Dalek Mania was that as monsters went, they were fun and easy to imitate. Just stick your arms out stiffly before you and warble ‘exterminate!’ They had all these rounded surfaces, their dome, the bulb of their eye stalk, the chassis and all those bumps. People like round things – animals with short round faces are considered cute, it’s part of our biological wiring. Along with the creepy scary qualities, the daleks also had weirdly cuddly attractive qualities, both wrapped up in the same package. That fact that they were both at once is pretty unique, only the Yeti really pull that trick, although in some ways the Cybermen and Sontarans have a bit of it. I think that this quality remains on some subliminal level – they’re quite goofy and old fashioned, but still kind of cute.
4) They were semantically disturbing – the Daleks were Nazi’s, pretty much straight out from their first appearance. They were paranoid, hostile, dishonest, genocidal. Their voices were replete with hysteria, an unreasoning terror and hatred of the ‘other.
5) They had a hell of a run of good stories – the original Daleks, Dalek Invasion, Masterplan, Genesis, Remembrance, Power, Evil, Resurrection. There were bad Dalek stories, and poor Dalek moments. Revelation and the Chase were pretty tosh. Planet of the Daleks and Day of the Daleks were ho hum. But still, they had a really solid set of classic and near classic stories, a body of topnotch work that sustained them when other qualities began to fade. Basically, Daleks had such a body of work, so many really good stories, so well established that when the series rebooted – they kept getting excellent stories under Ecclestone and Tenant.
6) Levelling up/Avoiding Decay – a recurrent problem for any threat is familiarity. Familiarity breeds content. A universe beater in the first appearance is often a lot less scary second time around. We know who they are, we know what they can do, and they’ve been beaten once. By the time of the fifth or sixth appearance, they’ve had their asses kicked pretty consistently, so what’s to be scared of. Often the writing gets pretty perfunctory. The Daleks, on the other hand, have been consistently good at levelling up – in their first appearance, they were just assholes confined to their city, relying on static electricity. Second appearance, they devastated earth. Third appearance they’d mastered Time Travel. Fourth appearance, they were a full fledged space empire. They’re the guys who waxed the Time Lords in the Time War. By the Tenant period, they’re stealing and assembling planets into a giant Universe-destroying Gun, or invading from interdimensional space. In short, they kept on levelling up. It wasn’t always consistent. They kind of stalled out a bit under Pertwee. And there’s the embarrassing scene where a teenage girl beat one to death with a baseball bat in Remembrance, and there’s some embarrassing wobbles in the Chase, etc. But by and large, they’ve been taken seriously because they got steadily more serious.
9 October 2015 at 14:29 #44374I think that Daleks in the new series manage to hold their place as the pre-eminent monsters for a few of these reasons. One of the biggest is historical provenance – they’re as Iconic as the blue police box. But having established them as essential, there’s a strong impulse to try and take them seriously, to treat them with respect and awe. There have been lousy Dalek stories in the new series – Daleks in Manhattan, or the New paradigm stuff, but there have also been strong ones. I think that even if their physical form has lost a lot of its potential and we’ve gotten used to it, it’s still got a kind of appealing toyetic quality. What’s most interesting about the Daleks is that they’re creatures of pure hatred – that got established early on, and they’ve never wavered from that. Or if they’ve wavered, they’re keeping close to that baseline.
9 October 2015 at 15:49 #44375Bear with me, I’m just trying to work out ideas.
Let’s try Cybermen. The second place monsters. They haven’t done as well as Daleks. But let’s dig in and see what they’re made of.
One thing that strikes me about the Cybermen is that their appearance and fortunes have changed dramatically through their incarnations. Strictly speaking, there have been four principle Cybermen designs: 1) The Tenth Planet cybermen, with their cloth faces and codpiece guns. 2) The Tomb Cybermen under Troughton, that show up in Tomb of the Cybermen, Moonbase, and Wheel in Space. 3) The Waffle-Head Cybermen, who showed up in the Invasion, then proceeded to skip Pertwee and bother Baker, Davison, Baker and McCoy. 4) The Cybus Tin-Can Men, the modern armoured Iconic design.
Visually, the Cybermen look like men in monster suits. There’s no effort to get away from that. Indeed, the Cybermen motif is that they are men in those suits, simply men who have been cyber-colonized or rebuilt or upgraded. So maybe that kind of works for the concept.
What’s always consistently struck me about most of the cybermen incarnations is that really… they’re a cheap build. Think about it – some silver overalls, a helmet, throw some vaccuum tubing on and get a helmet and there you go. The design crew has been pretty honest that the waffle head bodies were simply flight suits painted silver. Flight suits are cheap! And hell, those chest units – in a lot of the classic serials, it’s painfully obvious that the chest units aren’t affixed to their bodies, but just hanging there like gigantic medallions.
Well, comparatively. You look, for instance at the Ice Warrior costume, and that’s a huge expensive costume. That crocodile scaled body, that elaborate carapace, the mix of articulation, helmet and armor… that will run up the budget and takes time to build. On the other hand, a cyberman? Assuming you’ve got a helmet mold – twenty minutes with some spare parts and some silver paint and bob’s your uncle. Want two? Well.. their mojo is that they all look the same.
Is this a reason why the Cybermen were so popular? That the costumes were cheap. I think that had something to do with it. One advantage of a fast, cheap, easy build is that you can have a lot of them. That’s important for a show on a budget. Look at Daleks – they were expensive builds, initially, they only built four of them, and just recycled them over and over, adding new ones and swapping out parts as they wore out, they literally amortized. Ice warriors or Yeti, were only used a couple of times and were expensive builds.
But surely the BBC was not such a whore. I mean, they wouldn’t select their monsters on the basis of cheapness, would they? Probably not. But there’s a key to a really cheap fast build, that is… you can do a lot of them. Seeds of Death, you might not be able to afford a lot of Ice Warriors, but in Tomb or in Invasion, you can afford an entire army of them – basically as long as the budget for extras holds out.
And that does provide a cachet. There’s less need to ‘hide’ and ‘shuffle and jive’ your few costumes to try and make it look more like a multitude. You can actually have several. One of the consistent visual traits of the Cybermen is that they show up as an army, there are several of them, and that gives them a kind of implacable force quality. An individual monster, well, you throw rocks at it, or jab it with a pointed stick, or you run away. But a formation of a dozen… what do you do? It helps to make them scary or intimidating.
There’s other subtle visual elements that add to their formidability, that are associated with their concept. They’re by far the most organized and militaristic of the monsters. They move and operate collectively, they have formations, command structures. That adds to their use in numbers and makes them serious.
Then there’s the neutrality of their masks. Early monsters – Bela Lugosi’s robot, or Paul Blaisdell’s creations were festooned with fangs and scowls to make them look scarier. In contrast, the face of a cyberman is entirely neutral. It is very clearly a simplified human face – eyes, a mouth. But not scowling, not happy, not animated or purposeful – simply blank and neutral. Even when they’re attacking, their expressions are blandly neutral. This was used very effectively in the Terminator movies, where the Terminators get torn up, or tear into each other, without any signs of pain or rage – devastation, with absolutely indifferent expressions. I’d suggest that the lack of emote for the cybermen is an early version of this, and that it was subtly effective.
Of course, the show’s producers might not have picked up on this, because there was an effort with the waffle heads to emote – the transparent chin pieces to allow the subliminal effect of the mouth moving, and David Bank’s sometimes pompous performance as Cyber Leader in the later Classic years might undercut this. It wouldn’t be the first time that a show undercut its monster by not understanding what worked about it.
In terms of their stories and trajectory, the Cybermen have never been as much of a threat as the Daleks. They don’t just lose, in the 10th Planet, their entire world dies – ouch! In Revenge of the Cybermen, they’re revealed to have lost the great cyber war and are reduced to scattered remnants hiding out. Where the Daleks can be seen to be levelling up as a greater and greater threat over the show’s history, the Cybermen tend to flounder. They often come across as a bit pathetic. They lose their planet, they have to go into hibernation, they lose their war, they’re basically hard done by. They’re around, but they don’t achieve the menace of the Daleks. Hell, within classic canon, they’ve not even mastered Time Travel like the Daleks.
What about the underlying concept of the Cybermen? I think that’s evolved a little bit over the years, and I don’t know how well it’s actually been followed through. The Daleks started out with a pretty straightforward motif ‘space nazi’s’ and ‘hysterical personalities’.
The Cybermen initially represented Kit Pedlar’s extrapolation of humanity losing its human-ness through continuous replacement, men devolving literally to robots. That’s weird and disturbing, and I don’t think it’s ever been fully explored. In part because you would need much more of an internal monologue of personal disintegration and replacement than a visual story could show.
I think that de-emphasized rapidly, and a slightly different motif emerged – the Cybermen as a force of colonization. They don’t want to conquer you, they want to colonize you, to convert and take over you. And in doing so, they eradicate everything that’s you and turn you into a kind of army ant, a faceless drone, neutral, obedient, implacable. It’s a silver plated ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ motif – and that’s actually quite powerful. I think that the cybermen, classic and new, are at their best when they dwell on this.
“We don’t want to kill you Dave, we just want to make you like us, and in the process, we’ll just throw away everything that makes you Dave. So I suppose you’ll be dead in all the ways you care about. But you’ll be alive in the ways that we care about. And that’s all that matters.”
Whoa! That’s some creepy and disturbing shit.That’s also not in the 10th Planet, but it does show up a little bit in Tomb, and more forcefully in Wheel and Moonbase. It’s lost altogether in Revenge. One of the reasons I love Attack of the Cybermen is that it really gets right what is scary and disturbing about Cybermen, deliberate conversions, with failed conversions doing slave labour, their absolute lack of affect when torturing or attacking, their indifference to harm – visually and conceptually, they were right on. Whatever issues or problems the story may have had, they got the Cybermen right.
9 October 2015 at 16:43 #44376@denvaldron Excellent analysis of both the Daleks and the Cybermen. Your point about the consistency of the Daleks (hate) compared to the changing character of the Cybermen is spot on. For me, part of the problem with the Cybermen in AG Who is that they have been turned into a variation on a type of Sci-Fi monster that emerged during the gap between BG Who and AG Who: the Borg. And as such, they don’t seem to have the unnerving creepiness that they possessed in BG Who.
9 October 2015 at 22:51 #44383Or were the Borg just a rethinking of the Cybermen? Nu-who’s single big innovation with the Cybermen is the suggestion that after conversion, you might still be yourself down there, trapped, deep down, helpless, a prisoner of your cyber-circuitry.
There’s also that Matt Smith episode set far in the future where the Cybermen were such a threat that they obliterated whole sectors of space, and where even a cyberman relic was infectious. That’s such an extreme far flung take on the cybermen that really… they’re barely cybermen.
Of course, it’s the same thing with Daleks. Both Daleks and Cybermen have, in their extreme incarnations, gone nanotechnology, which means that both are now infectious transformative life forms. But it also ignores a lot of the potentials of nanotech. Nanotech based monsters are so peculiar a thing, that I’d suggest that they shouldn’t have bothered.
9 October 2015 at 23:13 #44384One thing with cybermen is that they suffer the slow-monster syndrome. The costumes are relatively workable. The Cybermen body suits do not unduly restrict movement. There’s a full range of motion, and with allowances, it is possible to move fast and precisely with them. The hands are about as flexible and dexterous as hands that are encased in rigid gauntlets. Compare that to the lego hands of the Ice Warriors. So they can do more. The problem with the cybermen however is that the costume helmets limit their visibility. So they can’t move freely, for fear of tripping over furniture, bumping into things and each other.
So typically, the Cybermen move slowly and carefully over distance. In close quarters, they can move pretty quickly, or in doing things like marches in formation. This kind of works to their advantage a bit, in that it gives the cybermen a stiff, deliberate, even implacable quality that’s consistent with their motif as robotically enhanced people.
I think perhaps the limitation on movement probably lead to the development of the great cybermen ‘money shot’ – you know the one? Where they just burst out of a wall, or capsule or something, and step forward, like a very calm and determined silver hulk. It wasn’t part of Tenth Planet, but it was an Iconic image for Tomb, and variations of it showed up repeatedly after that.
9 October 2015 at 23:23 #44385I’m struggling with this a little, because you seem to ne taking what makes a monster, and then mixing it with some hugely subjective stuff about legacy. How about we concentrate on first or early appearances?
Because if a monster reappeared, it was a success. What made it the success? What is our first impression of the Sontarans, say?
9 October 2015 at 23:48 #44388Now, let’s look at the third great monster – and arguably, the Classic series only produced three.
The Sontarans. Okay – terrific costume. It beats the cybermen like a rented mule, it’s beautifully simple. No ornaments, no accouterments, just a simple space/soldier uniform. It’s got appropriate padding, but it doesn’t impede movement at all. Even better, the headpiece allows for full visibility for the actor, there’s very little restriction of the field of vision. A Sontaran costume allows an actor almost complete freedom. No worries about stumbling over furniture. You can even ’emote’ which I’m told that actors are fond of doing (although I’ve heard a good shot of antibiotics will clear that up).
The most novel aspect of the Sontaran costume is the headpiece, a profoundly thick necked potato headed headpiece. The early version had nasty eyebrow and chin hairs. This kind of fit in with their backstory of being heavy gravity worlders. But it also fit in with their metaphorical origin – they were a race of soldiers, they were based on an exaggeration of a notion of the bull necked thick headed warrior, the muscle whose head sits on a thick, thick neck. In short, they were a soldier race, who where an exaggeration of the notion of the soldier.
Robert Holmes created a whole backstory for the Sontarans, an eternal war with the Rutans, a race of clones, a kind of Spartan civilization that had devoted itself completely to warfare.
This was in the chill period of the cold war and of the youth movement. 1974-75, the origin period of the Sontarans was a period of social confrontation. On the one hand, there were the cold warriors from the 50’s and 60’s, now into their third or fourth decade. On the other side was social upheaval, détente, the fall of Nixon, the fall of Vietnam, the peace movement, the emergence of china as a third force, etc. There were a lot of people who were saying that the cold war, or the eternal war, the state of armed terror between two superpowers… that was a bad idea. I think the Sontarans really were inspired by that cultural moment.
So why did they go on to become the third great monster, in a field littered with also-rans: The Quarks, the Yeti, the Ice Warriors, etc. etc. Why did they succeed, when deliberate attempts to create the new daleks failed?
My cynical answer is that the costume because it was relatively cheap, doable and offered a lot of freedom, made them easy. The Sontarans had five appearances in the classic series – The Time Warrior, the Sontaran Experiment, the Invasion of Time, the Two Doctors, and Jim’ll Fix It. They also had some major pseudo appearances – Shakedown, Mindgame, Mindgame Trilogy. And they’ve made it into Nu Who.
There’s some evidence that their ‘motif’ wavered. The Invasion of Time or the Two Doctors didn’t intrinsically require Sontarans. Their mythos was not in play. They could have been subbed out by any suitably bad monsters.
The Sontaran experiment, I think, is very much in Holmes mold. It’s pretty much a throwaway serial. But the Sontaran feels true. Not particularly sadistic or malicious, but not at all kind, he’s just a soldier doing his job, which is conducting field examinations on humans by torturing them to death. Tom Baker has this wonderful shtick where he unstrings the Sontaran by telling him that he’s wasted his time on inferior servants and hasn’t actually tested the humans at all. You can just see the Sontaran mentally kicking himself and swearing over wasted time.
But then you get to the Invasion of Time, and it’s less persuasive.
There’s a trope called ‘villain decay’ which explains how the tough world beater at its first appearance can slowly lose its distinctiveness and menace and simply become a generic and rather unimpressive villain. It’s familiarity.
I think that in the later part of the classic series, the Sontarans suffered that. I mean look at the Two Doctors. The Sontarans are supposed to be a clone race, that’s part of their shtick. But they’re different sizes? I think that perhaps because their costumes offered opportunity.
The pseudo-stories and the new series actually try to be more faithful to the Sontaran motif. It’s interesting, because we are far removed from the particular cultural fulcrum of their creation.
But perhaps that distance from the cultural fulcrum is why the Sontarans are such a distant third. There’s enough there to keep them in the game. But not enough to get them star billing?
10 October 2015 at 00:02 #44391Astute comments and very interesting. I am wrestling with legacy. I mean, with Daleks, for instance, it’s really impossible to separate them from their legacy. For all the great monsters, there’s a body of appearances which span decades or multiple Doctors, there’s a continuous wrestling of new writers with ‘what do these guys mean’ and perhaps a simple issue of what do we do with them.
It seems to me that a monster can be created with really distinctive iconic qualities. Qualities that make you want to come back to them, and get them more stories. But once the monster is established, does it retain those iconic qualities.
Are Daleks or Cybermen or Sontarans uniquely themselves in every story they inhabit, are they so distinctive in each story, that you couldn’t simply switch them out with one of the others, or some other utterly generic made up monster? And if they’re not that distinctive in some of these stories, if they end up as generic monsters in stories, how much mojo do they retain? Do they import mojo into those stories based on their previous history?
Do they get it back in further stories? Is a first appearance as defining as a last? Do we look at an overall gestalt? Surely the fact that they keep on coming back, and may well keep on levelling up or accumulating mythology counts for something? What about repeat appearances where they don’t level up or add mythology?Forgive me. You may have the impression I’m speaking with authoritative certainty. If I was, I’d probably do it as a blog. I’m actually thinking out loud, without much certainty.
I started off with ‘what archetypal or iconic symbolic aspects’ make a monster great. But then, the more I thought of it, the more I waded into a swamp of visual impacts and motifs, which took me into the countryside of costume design and the limitations and advantages, and then recurrent stories, legacies, etc.
I find I am almost at sea. I might come across as a philosopher pontificating pompously, imperiously declaring pronouncements. But really, I’m a man on a little boat in a stormy sea getting tossed around, and trying to find a place to grip onto to make sense of it all.
10 October 2015 at 00:15 #44392On the Sontarans, a leftover point. It’s worth comparing the Sontarans with Joe Haldeman’s Forever War, about a millennia long war between humans and an alien race of clones called the Taureans. The war so completely shapes and redefines human society, that ultimately, humanity becomes a cloned race themselves. I’m not sure that the Forever War inspired the Sontarans. The dating seems wrong. But it seems that the ideas were floating out there at the time.
10 October 2015 at 01:59 #44393I am not sure I would agree that the Borg were an imitation of the BG Who. If anything, I think the AG Who Cybermen were, and are increasingly, an imitation of the Borg.
Your point about the new Cybermen is correct–they want to convert you; in other words, the Borg. But beyond this, I am not sure what AG Who wants to do with them–in “Nightmare in Silver” beyond there being thousands of them and they moved very fast–what was the point of them? When Missy marshalls them, they go through the motions of reminding us of their iconic look as they walk through London, but beyond the historical allusion, what is the point? The idea that the Brigadier could inhabit a Cyberman costume and do something heroic did not really gell with this viewer, who first saw them in “The Tenth Planet”. Frankly, I do not think Moffat (who I admire enormously) has figured out what to do with them. Which is a pity, given how important they are to the show.
10 October 2015 at 08:17 #44407Interesting discussion, my thoughts on what makes a great monster would be two fold.
1/. The initial concept.
No need to revisit earlier posts as to why so successful but suffice to say Daleks, Cybermen, Sea Devils (Yes the Sea Devils) and Weeping Angels etc
That initial impact for a variety of reasons could be reflections of current/past political issues or something that makes a particular monster stand out personally. The greater the initial impact the better said monster can survive poor follow up adventures.
Impact does not equate with budget for costume or currently special effects wizardry but the psychological impact, for example The 456 as the main monsters but then our own government(s) magnified their evil by betraying the people. Great monsters make us see them in ourselves.
2/. Writing post introduction
This is the tricky one, but if the follow on stories are good the monster/villain can grow. The Daleks have been well served in this the Cybermen perhaps less so (though I absolutely loved the Neil Gaiman “Nightmare in Silver” Cyberman, these little beauties had menace with upgrades). Sontarans can become more than they are now (especially with @whisht ‘s Sontaran Dog’s of War concept)
Battery went on my laptop half way through this so apologies if it makes less sense than what used to be usual and may become usual again, life is a bit timey-wimey ;0)
10 October 2015 at 11:55 #44410@rob good to hear from you! Annoying when the lap top battery dies! Put on a pot of coffee 🙂
10 October 2015 at 12:49 #44411As this is the Cloven Hoof I need no excuse to say welcome back @rob. Hope life is treating you well and reenactments are still a thing.
Cheers
Janette
10 October 2015 at 13:42 #44412Interesting thoughts @denvaldron
And @rob I’d forgotten about that dogs of war thing. I’m on a train so can’t find it but can kinda remember trying to come up with a monster that even its creators would be ashamed of (riffing on the creation of soldiers who become ‘awkward’ for civilians when they return from war and who realise they’ve brutalised in order to do their ill-thought through dirty work).In terms of monsters, I think there’s a distinction between monster and villain.
Villains have schemes and plans.
Monsters are simply acting out their own nature.
Not sure if that thought furthers anything(!) or confuses it (as sales would be monsters, Davros a villain along with bg cyber men whereas now cyber men are almost henchmen /monsters.Better hit send before I lose all this ramble!
10 October 2015 at 19:35 #44420@whisht Villains have schemes and plans. Monsters are simply acting out their own nature.
Sounds like a good rule of thumb to me, though all sorts of other considerations would of course blur the distinctions into each other (like, a monster that has *become* a villain or once was a villain, and v.v., etc).
10 October 2015 at 21:47 #44427Budget isn’t associated with it, at least not in the sense that throwing more money at something gets you a better monster.
But production design, which can be boundaried by budgets, have a lot to do with what your creature looks like, the advantages and limits of its function, etc. Compare It Terror From Beyond Space with Alien to see the difference that production design makes.
A lot stands on initial impact. It’s that initial impact that allows a creature to keep on coming back. I agree with that.
Are the Sea Devils or Silurians a successful monster? I dunno. Taken together, the Sea Devils and Silurians made a total of three appearances in the classic series. The Silurians have had a single story in the Nu Who, and have supplied Madame Vastra, a supporting character. The Sea Devils haven’t been seen since Warriors of the Deep.
10 October 2015 at 21:54 #44429Hmmm. I’m not sure I’m making distinctions between monsters and villains. Monsters are theoretically singular beings. But I’m using it rather imprecisely here in terms of Doctor who robots or alien races requiring extensive costume/prop construction/wardrobe/make up/prosthetics, typically seen in numbers. Villains require less baggage, and are presented as human or humanoid.
11 October 2015 at 00:46 #44445I was watching a horrible film (imo) called Abe Linccoln the Vampire Slayer and beyond the constant slo-mo ‘effects’ I did find one thing interesting and that was the vampires themselves. Often in films they’re increasingly seen as sexy devils -even Spike and Angel from Buffy became “cute vampires” (I’m quoting from the book about all things J. Whedon -although I don’t necessarily agree, as in Season 4, Angelus is incredibly frightening and this is down to acting and directing & not necessarily budget) and whilst Rotten Tomatoes scored Abe Lincoln’s Vampire Slayer around a 3.5 to 3.9, I did think the vampires were truly horrible and cleverly made up.
So perhaps budget (overall = US 93 million ) does have an impact. Although, considering its Rotten T. ratings and the general disrespect viewers had for it, there is an implication that no matter how gloriously re-created these vampires were it made no ultimate difference to viewing pleasure.
For me, it was the only thing that secured my seat (given that I taped it and could have pressed ‘stop’ at any time) 🙂
Villains require less baggage, and are presented as human or humanoid.
Are they always? I was watching the latest season of Supernatural (not the most adroit thing to ever find its way to telly land) and there’s a witch, apparently Crowley’s mother -yes she’s human-ish but most definitely a monster. She has the typically thin, white toothed, attractive, long hair, pale skin- thing which is Supernatural’s casting ‘rules’ for all females (except for when they’re spray tanned) but her features are often transformed into something more ‘monstery.’
On the topic of vampires above -most definitely human, but when ‘changed’ they’re monsters (totally) -and yet can change back. Then we have the monsters in the Terminator franchise -not villains, surely? I’m thinking of Terminator 2 where the monster can change form -slide through walls, turn into gloop after a fire and re-animate…back into a human. But he has one goal, I believe, and that is to kill the child and his mother: the villainy is left to others in the future to dictate and he merely carries out the orders. He looks completely human -can convince anyone of anything due to his appearance and yet he’s a monster through and through.
Kindest, puro.
11 October 2015 at 00:51 #44447@purofilion
I don’t necessarily agree, as in Season 4, Angelus is incredibly frightening
Season 2 (he was off into spin-off land by S4)
Pedant.
11 October 2015 at 01:21 #44451Ah, I think I meant S4 Angel (which I neglected to mention)-where he’s fighting against himself in an effort to kill off the Big Bad which is controlled by the creature controlling Cordelia?
11 October 2015 at 01:30 #44452Great to see you @rob and I agree with what you (and @whisht) say here. I think that’s a huge point that the relative success of the monsters first outing usually touches on some wider fear or issue.
The reason that I mentioned the Sontarans specifically is that I watched the Bred for war boxset of all four Sontaran BG stories relatively recently and they are fresh in my mind.
It’s really striking that much of the lore about Sontarans, conventions like names beginning with S, etc. doesn’t really occur in their first story. The Sontaran, Jingo Linx, is more of a villain in that he gets a lot of dialogue. I wouldn’t have thought any previous creations in sci-fi had any bearing on his creation by Robert Holmes, because Holmes didn’t get along with science fiction. Holmes bought a lot of other stuff to the show, including a love of Gothic horror and Victorian era penny dreadfuls.
Holmes lied about his age to get into the army and became the youngest soldier to win a commission to officer in WWII. After he had a short (and apparently unhappy) stint with the Police before becoming a journalist and trying his hand at this TV scriptwriting lark.
I think that is why he was so good at writing the Brig. I also think Lynx was a comment on how war can turn men into monsters. Wilfred Owen wrote a great poem (the name escapes me at the moment) in which the narrator describes a rural scene in completely military terms. Lynx is a warrior who can’t conceptualize ideas unless they deal with battle. Strax is the nearest to this concept we’ve had since then, but it’s played for laughs.
I think his experiences as a journalist undoubtedly informed Sarah Jane Smith. People tend to forget she could be amazingly judgemental in her early series. I’d also say that his experience with the Police fed through into Who. He never tired of pointing out that Police could be monsters and that justice was flawed. His idea of the twisted future Doctor was the Valeyard. A biased prosecutor in a loaded trial. The man loved using monsters as a metaphor.
11 October 2015 at 01:45 #44453Just on the Borg thing, I’d agree that people get hung up on the cyborg comparison with the Cybermen.
I do think that there is a precursor to the Borg in Who though.
Consider, the Borg infect you with nanobots, which invade and change the body to become one of them. In doing so the network or hive mind gains access to your thoughts and experience to turn against your former allies.
Now watch Arc in Space and the Wirrn.
They implant their eggs or contaminate your tissue with theirs and your body mass is converted to Wirrn. In doing so they absorb your thoughts, memories and experience. They share that through their insectoid hive mind and use it against your former allies.
The Borg are the Wirrn with a bit of Cyberman thrown in. They obviously watched Tom Baker in his first series. 😉
11 October 2015 at 22:51 #44520@phaseshift Thank you for your observations. If Holmes had been in the British army, he’d probably be well acquainted with the bull-necked old dogs and lifers that you’ll see in there. So yes, it fits. I’m glad that the Sontarans fit better when viewed as a whole.
11 October 2015 at 23:11 #44524In terms of the Fisher King in Before the Flood, that’s a pretty classic lousy monster, in terms of production design. We’re not talking something along the level of the Myrka, but bad enough. The Fisher King is inhabited by a 7’7″ inch Actor, and in simple terms, it’s impressive and awe inspiring on paper, with it’s cowl, insectoid features, spikes and gauntness.
Downsides? The whole thing looks like it weighs a hundred pounds, give or take. So right then and there’ it’s going to be hard to move around in. So mostly, it just stands there, looming at the Doctor. When it does move, it moves relatively slowly, at a sedate walk. It’s gestures are mostly unfocused.
They do their best to disguise it, but ultimately, it’s a man in a suit, and the effort to disguise it basically makes the suit unwieldy.
The overhanging head allows the possibility of vision, but not that much. The animatronic head has a limited range of motion – common enough with animatronics, it takes a talented puppeteer. Without actual body language or expression, and with limited ability to move, including inability to move quickly or precisely, what you’ve got is basically a big goon limited to trash talking and menacing looming.
Within the actual mechanical progress of the script, he doesn’t have much to do. Basically, the Fisher King has a plot. The Fisher King follows his plot. The Doctor foxes the Fisher King’s plot. End of story.
There’s nothing in the way of move, countermove. The Fisher King doesn’t react or respond, he doesn’t adapt, or change up. He just has his plot, and not much more, apart from the loomy and the trash talk.
There’s some opportunity to extrapolate some interesting backstory into the Fisher King’s premise. But we can’t know how much this is deliberate. A lot of this stuff is pulled out without too much deep thinking. So maybe it’s there, maybe it isn’t.
12 October 2015 at 05:13 #44569I found him to be ‘proper scary’ but then I believe his ghosts and the armada of the ghosts which would follow once the other members of his race arrived would be quite terrifying? No? There would be more than the One Fisher man. I know we are extrapolating along the Fisher King lines -and we know this was he. But in all Slavic stories of these Fisher Men, they were quite ordinary beings, happily transient near lakes and creeks waiting for years for lonely children or fishermen so they could drown them.
Could the Fisher King’s “loomy ….trash talk” be enough, given that we know so much about the Fisher King? He was almost incidental? No, that’s not quite what I mean, but I believe more than randomly, that this was a set piece focussed on Clara and the Doctor as well as the way the Doctor investigates or uses lives: eg, O’Donnell (and this was set up as @rorysmith says with the words “would Amy, Rose or Martha have lost their breakfast on their maiden flight? [I’m paraphrasing hopelessly]” ).
At one point, with the light at their sides (and not from behind) the “loomy” King standing imperiously over another King, the Doctor, was proper scary. It looked like the Doctor could be killed at any moment.
Also, could we say that the Fisher King, with his loominess, his imperial talk and general “sedate” appearance is much like the Time Lords themselves? @phaseshift wrote out the wonderful dialogue of Whithouse in School Reunion whereby the Time Lords have become somewhat lazy, remote and uninvolved. They’d become dry, locked in their time prisons, their ‘castles’ in the air, mouldering and passing time. In School Reunion, Anthony Head’s character is taken by the Doctor’s anger and ‘strange turn of phrase’ -“If I don’t like it, it will stop.”
The Fisher King(s) is much like the Time Lord’s themselves, I believe: or at least there’s a similarity beyond ancient writing, the age of the creature and the need to fight a long and endless war (somewhat different, and emanating from dissimilar aims, of course).
12 October 2015 at 06:08 #44580@purofilion The question of the utility of the costume is an objective one. Often there are gaps between design and implementation. Something that looks or seems amazing as a sketch or design often poses problems in the translation to a 3D wearable costume.
Generally, the key questions that a costume has to meet are:
1) Does it allow for full visibility – does the actor have a reasonable field of vision? The more restricted vision is, the more physically cautious people are. No one wants to move around a stage blind.
2) Does it allow for movement – that’s tricky. Heavy costumes, restrictive costumes, often attempt to look good but exact a price. Monster claws or talons are often not very sensitive or flexible, they’re extensions of hands, but they have little tactile feedback, no body awareness, they’re often quite immobile. So mostly, things get waved.
If you have a big heavy costume that the actor can’t see very well out of, or move around very much in… it’s a poor costume. The less mobility and visibility, the more it shifts from costume to prop.
If you can’t do much with a costume, then basically, you have to shoot around it, or work around the limitations. This is basically what they’re doing here. The Fisher King is barely mobile, barely expressive. This is a big ‘looked good on the drawing board, didn’t come off so well in execution.’
You have to remember, this isn’t a production with an unlimited budget or timetable. George Lucas could spend years in pre-production, looking at tens of thousands of production drawings and CGI renderings of Jar Jar Binks until he got exactly what he wanted (shudder).
Here, what they get is a script with a few vague or specific descriptions (the Fisher King, a towering insectlike humanoid, half person, half praying mantis…). Once approved, the script goes to the production crew, the art department reads it, they produce a set of sketches and designs, the set designers read it, the costume department reads it, the art department, the mechanics, the carpenters, the fabricators. They estimate what it will take, produce a budget, the budget gets approved or adjusted by the line producer.
Once that budget gets approved, there’s basically a month or so to turn all those sketches into a costume. They’ve got to simultaneously work on costumes and sets and pieces for twelve other episodes. Are there mechanical effects – eyes that move, cheeks that puff, those are mechanical effects, which means that you might have to bring in fabricators and effects techs. There’s just a certain number of hours.
So everyone does their best, tries it out, works through. But sometimes designs just don’t work out all that well.
The thing is, with the Fisher King…. they haven’t done one of those before. This is the first time. And they’ve only got one shot at doing it, they’ve got limited man hours, limited money, two or three or four departments or specialists have to coordinate, or not coordinate as it goes.
It’s not a mortal sin to say they tried with the Fisher King and it just didn’t work out to be a very good or effective costume. That’s just a practical judgement.
In contrast the ghosts are quite mobile and expressive, they move smoothly and interact with their environment.
12 October 2015 at 06:15 #44581@purofillion One more thing. It’s entirely possible that the Fisher King’s Cowl is a deliberate visual callback to the Time Lord’s ceremonial high collars.
Which might imply that the Fisher King itself is actually of the race of the Vampires or Fendahl (or possibly the two are the same race) as a prior Time Lord nemesis. I’ll leave it open as a speculation.
The fall of the Time Lords and the Daleks probably left a lot of room for thoroughly nasty things to come creeping back.
12 October 2015 at 06:21 #44583you have to remember that whilst they have little time, they then have to produce the thing. And considering my idea that the Fisher King is a secondary plot point dressed in a bigger plot (arc) then how he moves or looks might also be secondary. Certainly to me, it wasn’t mortal or sinful: it looked scary and equated well with ‘lizard devils’ in Cold Blood and that other creepy monster, also by Whithouse, in The God Complex.
I like your idea about the Cowl: very well spotted indeed.
12 October 2015 at 06:24 #44584@purofilion Actually, the remark about the cowl was simply a corollary to your drawing a parallel between the Fisher Kings and the Time Lords. So I have to give you credit on that one.
13 October 2015 at 02:23 #44644Pure and utter speculation on my part, but on the unannounced topic of “Who or what could Maisie Williams’ character be in The Girl Who Died…I think….
She’s a TARDIS, possibly a War TARDIS lost from the Last Great Time War, that made it’s way to Earth… or possibly the Master’s TARDIS (where has that been all this time, anyway?). Either way a TARDIS would be able to help the Doctor find Gallifrey.
Anyone else have any speculation to add?
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