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21 March 2015 at 15:20 #39032
@craig, @Purofilion, @janetteb
Joseph Campbell took that further with his book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” which is really worth a read.
Yeah, Campbell and The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Ground breaking, definitely worth reading, very important for story writers. Originally written in 1949.
And there has been one heck of a lot of research done since 1949 (all those Comparative Religions departments are full of people who have to do something to get tenure). For example, we now know that the Jesus-story is told (mostly) according to the conventions of Graeco-Roman biography. Very few modern scholars would agree that there is a dying-and-rising god pattern that genuinely goes across several belief systems. There are definitely some other areas where we’ve moved on since 1949, or even since the 2nd edition in 1968, but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Personally, I’d cite Campbell on story any day of the week; I wouldn’t dare cite him on comparative religion.
Even in story, I think you’d find there’s been developments. There’s been a ton of scholarly work on narrative since the 1980’s, and there’s a lot of current research on whether our self-understanding is basically ‘narrative’ – because of the way we perceive time and remember the past, do we understand our lives and our society as ‘story’?
Has anyone read Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots? I rate that one quite highly, especially since it allows you to develop The Hero’s Journey away from the ‘Save the Cat’ mode of writing. 😉
20 March 2015 at 11:08 #38994Regarding the Time Lock – Steven Moffat’s clarified this a bit.
They didn’t make it a big thing within the series because it’s something that the characters haven’t really twigged yet. But travelling to Gallifrey and the Doctor’s past showed that when The Moment lifted the Time Lock, it stayed lifted. The Time Lock is gone; the problem is that the Doctor no longer knows Gallifrey’s present location.
It took me until the end of Series 8 to really reconcile myself to Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. Not that I don’t think it’s a good performance; he was just so very different. By Listen I could see that he was going to be terrific, but even up to Kill the Moon, I was wondering if he was going to be a Doctor that I wanted to watch.
Fortunately, Mummy on the Orient Express (IN SPACE!) reassured me and Flatline was pretty darn good as well. David Tennant and Matt Smith were both so instantly loveable that I’d forgotten accepting a new Doctor can take time.
they should have put more time and episodes into it
Uh, seriously? You do realise that the production office for a Doctor Who series typically sets up nine months before first broadcast, don’t you? Movie grade special effects take time. Who also lacks a big ensemble cast – which means the shooting schedule is constrained by the needs of the two principals to have time to learn lines, eat and sleep. 😉
RTD went sideways on the ‘more episodes’ thing; he set up spin-off series with independent production offices. Steven Moffat might well have been thinking of doing that – but then his wife persuaded him to do Sherlock for Hartswood instead. 🙂
18 March 2015 at 22:00 #38943@DroneX1
It’s Isaiah 53:5. If you must play Bible Bingo, please try and get the chapter and verse right. 😉
Anyway, ignoring the verses wrenched so violently out of context that someone should probably inform the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to the Gospel, I’d go with @purofilion and @ichabod and say that ‘I’m not your boyfriend’ is the Doctor not-quite-apologising for a fairly massive mistake.
He’s allowed everyone to think that he’s Clara’s boyfriend. In fact, he’s been thinking of himself as Clara’s boyfriend. He’s been flirting with her like crazy.
But in this new regeneration one thing that is very, very clear to him is that he’s over 2000 years old (and probably feeling every year of it). He isn’t her boyfriend. He was fooling himself, pretending he was young, having (as the Hurt Doctor said) a mid-life crisis.
And the only thing that stopped him hurting Clara badly was that she realised he couldn’t be her boyfriend. Not for real.
It wasn’t her mistake.
17 March 2015 at 22:48 #38915The behind-the-scenes video had some details on the flat people effect.
Basically, it involved taking lots of 2D photos of the actors and then using the photos for animation.
17 March 2015 at 22:42 #38914@purofilion
Well, frankly, I think your ‘ring of bleble’ is considerably funnier than my ‘nanowotsits’ (what ARE they called?)
The said nanowotsits make an appearance in The Empty Child, The Big Bang and … Death in Heaven. Where they are used to build new Cybermen
WE ARE BACK ON TOPIC! [punches the air and goes for a victory lap of on-topicness] 😉
17 March 2015 at 13:59 #38907But enough of that, Jim, what do you really think? 😀
It’s a perfectly sensible top ten, actually, though I’d agree that The Eleventh Hour ought to be in there.
You’ve got:
- The first regeneration of the modern era
- The story where the companions of the modern era are all reunited together with some of the cast from the spin off shows
- Vincent and the Doctor – an extremely powerful show from Matt Smith’s era
- The Fiftieth Anniversary Special
- The loss of the first Companion of the modern era (Rose)
- The story which ends the Tennant/RTD era
- and one heck of a lot by some bloke called Steven Moffat.
Top tens are always a bit argumentative – but I really don’t see anything wrong as such. People seem to have been voting on ‘historical status’ rather than ‘story quality’, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
16 March 2015 at 21:13 #38892Yes, they shot some scenes from the episode in pick-ups, weeks or possibly months after the main shooting block. By which time, Peter Capaldi had had a haircut.
Haircut spotting is always fun – there’s another good example in Time of Angels where Matt Smith’s Doctor seems to leap off mid episode for a quick trim.
16 March 2015 at 13:25 #38889Aha! Thanks, pedant
16 March 2015 at 10:09 #38885@purofilion
the ring of bleble?
Good name for it. I think it was actually called the Ultimate Schism. Given Time Lords’ normal naming pattern, it’s quite surprising it wasn’t called The Schism of Rassilon.
Control freakery in men is usually renamed ‘a natural leader’ 😈 But the term does get applied to men – it’s whether Steven Moffat is defining Clara as a ‘control freak’ because he thinks she is one, or because he’s noticed that women who do take charge are called that (to the extent that they think of themselves as ‘control freaks’).
Possibly both: Clara’s natural type ‘A’ personality may have been aggravated into control freakery by her travels with the Doctor. She’s trying to juggle a normal life with TARDIS travel – and she’s also really, really keen on not letting even her close family know what she’s up to. Plus, the Smith Doctor was a bit prone to behave like a bored three-year old, which undoubtedly also encouraged her to see herself as the adult and the Doctor as the child.
It took her the whole of Series 8 to realise that the Doctor wasn’t a child any more. He was a ‘daft old man’.
15 March 2015 at 19:59 #38826Four dimensional alien, musing on their existence thinks, “I need a bit more time.”
I’ll get me coat…
15 March 2015 at 16:13 #38813@barbaralefty – Nice one. 🙂 I’ll bite.
Two dimensional woman, musing on her existence thinks, “I’m going round in circles, here.”
15 March 2015 at 08:55 #38805Just imagine trying to have a discussion and try explaining things to people while you’re trying to figure out the right word or expression for every other thing.
I don’t have to imagine.
Then I also have to work out how to spell the ruddy word…
Anyways, regarding:
I don’t like Moffat’s writting, which I thought I was allowed to believe
Yes, of course you’re allowed to believe this. But this is not a forum where that belief is going to go unchallenged. People can and will ask you to explain WHY you believe that – and they will expect you to answer by pointing to specific examples that you don’t like.
Or they will explain what they believe – just as with your second post, when you suggested this series has a problem with what Doctor Who’s all about and I replied that I thought it was about ‘Doctor Who?’
Equally, if you say ‘Doctor Who should be about time travel’ some smart alec (like me) is going to point out that we’re watching a classic Pertwee story this week which is entirely set on Earth. With no time travel whatsoever. A lot of the Pertwee stories were about the Doctor being stuck on Earth with a TARDIS that didn’t work.
And then you have to expand what you mean. Seven episodes in Series 8 wasn’t enough time travel. The Doctor trying to work out who he was meant you weren’t invested in the character enough. The Pertwee era had the Master (okay, that one won’t fly).
Are we good now?
14 March 2015 at 21:41 #38788What’s so crazy about bananas, anyway?
If you look at a banana, you’ll see that it’s curving gently round the bend…
…though to riff off the late Sir Terry, Missy is so far round the bend she’s now coming back in the opposite direction. And in the opposite gender.
14 March 2015 at 19:19 #38779There was certainly some flirty thing going on with Missmaster and so what is that about?
As I said elsewhere, years of subtext suddenly became very much text. 😈
Personally, I go for the Master/Missy as ‘that ex-boyfriend who turns out to be a psycho stalker’. But whether the Doctor is flat-out still not admitting that they were lovers, or whether the Master was simply the first in the long line of unrequited-hopelessly-in-love companions, we’ll probably never know.
Unless someone comes up with a really good script about it, of course. 🙂
14 March 2015 at 16:14 #38772Thank you for your kind thoughts. I’ll raise a glass to you. Well, a mug. Well, of tea.
We are, indeed, very lucky in the contributors here and much thanks to @craig for his hosting of this lovely corner of the Internet. 🙂
14 March 2015 at 12:27 #38753That’s how you come out with “romantic love” being taken these days as nearly the only form of love we recognize, when beyond its initial flare-up, it’s the least important,
To be utterly cynical, romantic love sells.
Romantic love sells: movies about it, books about it, songs about it, deodorant so you have a hope of getting it, after-shave…
Long term love, otoh, doesn’t sell anything. Not even nappies, because if you get divorced instead of keeping the promise, the kids will still need nappies. But in fact, getting divorced is better for the ‘romantic love’ sales pitches, because you’ll still be after the movies, books, songs, deodorant … but have to buy the nappies (etc.) as well.
I’m not going to go into any mass conspiracy theory, because in fact I think it’s more the result of a lot of little decisions by people who need to sell their stuff to make a living. But just look at the way that the kind of values that have been (sometimes not so subtly) discouraged don’t involve buying anything much. And the anti-values that have replaced them do.
In a desperate attempt to get this back on-topic (or we could move into the pub), Moffat seems to be trying to teach his generation of little Whovians that romantic love isn’t the be-all and end-all. Long term relationships, bringing up kids with love and care, they’re the important thing. His tenure has seen two long-term marriages among the regular characters, plus one disastrous relationship that nonetheless saw ‘the promise’ as more important than ‘the emotion’.
And that’s what saves the world.
14 March 2015 at 12:02 #38752I’m rather surprised that the TLs of DW even *have* formal marriage.But then, they’re not presented as superior in anything much but technological capabilities
Personally I’d say that as soon as RTD had the Master coming from inherited wealth, you’ve got to have formal marriage contracts. If the Master comes from a world where his father had estates, then which estate is joined to which and who is entitled to inherit them suddenly become important legal matters.
Since the BG and AG Doctors are frequently a bit confused by the whole money thing, it also suggests that ‘wealth’ in Time Lord society is either based on land, or based on academic attainment. Because even if Gallifrey is largely a post-scarcity economy, the one thing they ain’t making any more of is land. There’s always a finite supply of the stuff (and there’s certainly an implication that some kind of farming still takes place – which means them wot own the land have a stranglehold on whatever it is they farm).
The only alternative to inheriting some land (and we know the Doctor is probably the second son) is to succeed in graduating from the Academy – because the Time Lords may not always have land, but they do have power.
I will say one thing about Time Lord’s technological prowess, though. I bet their medicine is crap. Not only do they not seem to have a clue about how to cure the Master/Missy, but they can use regeneration energy for everything more serious than a sprained wrist.
I suspect their reply to anything worse than the common cold is ‘have you considered regeneration?’ 😀
13 March 2015 at 22:49 #38735You’re not the only one to think ‘tardigrades – hmmm, sounds like TARDIS’.
The fact that the research project seeing if they could survive in space used all caps is just a teeny bit suspicious…
Lovely little animals, BTW. I don’t think they could ever be a Doctor Who monster, because they’re undeniably (if microscopically) cute. 😉
13 March 2015 at 20:33 #38733@purofilion – yes, I agree that the Doctor’s grown up a lot since then. Even within the BG series, there’s quite a movement from ‘everything can be explained by science’ to the Seventh Doctor’s snapped out ‘any sufficiently advanced magic cannot be distinguished from science.’ 😉
And in Series 8 of AG, one of the underlying themes was the dangers of confusing a dogmatic faith in our particular conception of the world with the actual reality. I was rewatching Mummy tonight, and I noticed the scientist telling the Doctor that legends on Earth have no truth behind them. This to a guy who was chatting to Robin Hood a few episodes ago…
@mudlark – according to the commentary, they couldn’t find the type of barrow they wanted – so I don’t know whether they were genuinely ignoring the science or had changed the script to explain why the outside location was an Early Bronze Age round barrow. They wanted a long barrow, which I’d guess would go much better with a stone chamber? But they couldn’t get one with a usable entrance.
Roger Delgado is indeed wonderful – I think the AG scriptwriters and actors are wise to simply try and do their own take on the Master/Missy, rather than replicating that very still, precise, utterly controlled evil.
@janetteb – yes, I find Pertwee’s Doctor a bit overbearing. Even as a child, he was never ‘my’ Doctor – though he’s the first Doctor that I remember. An authority figure, but not loveable.
13 March 2015 at 14:09 #38727@purofilion
More generally, if Moffat’s conception of ‘love’ is that keeping the promise is more important than feeling that chemical high of ‘being in love’ – then you can see why, for example, he’d be okay with Gareth Roberts’ story of Craig defeating cyber-programming in Closing Time.
Because part of the overwhelming emotion of new parenthood is a promise to keep your helpless little child safe. Craig may be worried sick that he can’t keep that promise (because the chemical-induced moment of ‘being overwhelmed with love for your child’ has gone) but in fact – it’s so important to him that it can overcome cyber-programming.
12 March 2015 at 17:37 #38713the only explanation they gave for Danny helping Clara and The Doctor was “the power of love”…
Really? Were we watching different episodes?
Very clearly stated: ‘love’ isn’t an emotion. ‘Being in love’ is an emotion. It wasn’t the ‘power of love’ that made Danny save Clara and The Doctor, it was the implicit promise he’d made to Clara (the Doctor just got lucky) that he’d keep her safe.
It wasn’t the power of love, it was the sheer power of ‘duty’ to a soldier. And that particular power has been previously established as able to override Cyber-programming. Not by Steven Moffat; by Russell T Davies.
Funnily enough, I don’t recall a huge amount of complaints that the only reason given for Yvonne Hartmann helping the Doctor and Rose in Doomsday was ‘the power of duty’. 😉
12 March 2015 at 15:29 #38710Sadly, Sir Terry Pratchett has died.
A writer who gave me a great deal of joy over the years.
11 March 2015 at 22:25 #38701I honestly don’t think the Capaldi Doctor has yet been to the 50th Anniversary episode.
Mainly because of those calculations he keeps doing, but also because I think we’ll see him get there onscreen.
10 March 2015 at 23:03 #38689I think we could re-define Peter Capaldi’s early career as ‘appeared in a lot of rare DVD’s’ 🙂
Yes, my internet access right now is fine for text and short (ish) vids, but often gets a bit plaintive when I ask it to cope with 90 minutes.
10 March 2015 at 09:57 #38679@JannetteB
There was also from the same period Children of the Stones set in Avebury aimed at a younger audience.
It may have been aimed at a younger audience, but it certainly scared the cr*p out of thirteen-year-old me …
10 March 2015 at 09:49 #38678If he eats, assuming that time lords do require sustenance
That barn had the accoutrements of a working farm even in The Day of the Doctor. Which was what made it so poignant in Day of the Doctor; you could see how the war had utterly destroyed Gallifrey. No beautiful red sky, a lifeless desert, an old farm barn that had been abandoned.
In Listen the barn’s got hay, plus other farming equipment. Whether the baby Doctor is somehow in foster care or alternatively, Gallifreyan pre-Academy boarding schools all have working farms attached, I dunno. But farming implies eating. Certainly humans only learnt to farm because of the whole eating thing. 😉
I’d forgotten the sandwich. It actually looked home-made rather than shop-bought – I remember it as a white bread with cheese sarnie, covered in cling-film. Something he stuck in his pocket in case he got hungry later.
9 March 2015 at 10:07 #38651@arbutus – come to think about it, all the AG Doctors have a real thing about chips. The Tennant Doctor eats them in Last of the Time Lords, the Smith Doctor and the Capaldi Doctor both suggest going out for some.
I blame Rose, who got the job of introducing the Doctor to chips. I think. Anyone spotted any BG chip-eating?
8 March 2015 at 08:54 #38615Food – the Smith Doctor cooks (for Craig). He also does take-aways (he suggests fish and chips to Amy and Rory) and we see him drinking mugs of tea while in the TARDIS. So far, I think we’ve only seen the Capaldi Doctor with a take-away (Time Heist) plus the take-away coffee that lasted over two episodes.
In all those cases, it’s food as a social activity or food as entertainment. Makes sense; we know the TARDIS can produce the equivalent of a sandwich on demand. 😉
Moffat’s also slipped in another Scottish stereotype – the Capaldi Doctor has become distinctly aware that ‘work’ is something you get paid for. He asks Clara if he pays her and asks how much he’s paid when Kate says he works for her. He also ‘pays’ Psi and Saibra. The Smith Doctor, on the other hand, regarded money with the blithe attitude of a (very rich) aristocrat – and while he does give Amy and Rory a massively expensive house and car, it’s very clear that it’s a ‘present’, not ‘pay’.
7 March 2015 at 22:39 #38594When we’re doing retrospectives, could we go for stuff that’s readily available on DVD rather than just online? We’ve had two films in a row that were either a tenner used, or only get-at-able online.
It’s just that, currently, watching 90 minute films online is a bit tricky. And I’d quite like to watch the Capaldi retrospective, since I have a sneaking suspicion that I was the person who suggested it. 🙂
7 March 2015 at 21:02 #38592Sad that literacy was so exclusive then.
It was largely seen as a job skill. Certainly the levels of literacy (where there are records that can be used to assess whether people could sign their own names) rise sharply in cities like London or Cambridge – where there would be a lot of jobs that needed literate workers.
Certainly, when you get to the Early Moderns (1640’s), male illiteracy averages between 74% and 64% – except for London (22%) and Cambridgeshire (45%).
7 March 2015 at 19:49 #38590didn’t bathe because the Church looked down on pampering the beastly body
One of the great myths about the Middle Ages, that one. The reason there are so many fulminations against baths is because they were mostly in public bathhouses – and that means you have take your clothes off in public. This leads to Ungodly Things Happening. 😈 The medieval bathhouse often bore the same relation to ‘having a good wash’ as the modern massage parlour does to ‘curing my backache’. 😉
It’s quite true that many stories of saints include their miraculous inability to take a bath already – leading to at least one angelic visitation which included the instruction ‘please take a bath’ (apparently angels have a sense of smell). But that’s saints. They do weird stuff that ordinary mortals wot not of.
Ordinary mortals washed their hands before dinner. If you read Leviticus, you’ll discover that God is quite keen on hygiene. 🙂
5 March 2015 at 22:06 #38534Well, that was fun.
@thekrynoidman It wasn’t budget constraints that made the Doctor v. Salamander so short; it was a technical problem with the split screen (the film jammed). I entirely agree that the only reason this story had such a bad rep was the surviving episode (until the rediscovery) was the worst one of the lot. The rest of the story feels very different to most Who, but still rackets along at an exciting pace. It is very Bond-like – the would-be world dictator who has a machine that can create natural disasters. The other 60’s icon it riffs off would be The Avengers.
Anyway, nice to see Benik getting his comeuppance; also nice to see that the guards really did despise him. The Doctor’s mistrust of Giles Kent proves justified as well; Kent was in it with Salamander until he got double-crossed. I like the way the script shows Salamander as a sadistic so-and-so by having him first shoot Kent in the shoulder.
@craig – we’ll just have to imagine that the Research Station is a mobile free zone (bit like Jodrell Bank), so they have special public call boxes just outside the gates. 🙂
4 March 2015 at 00:59 #38493@purofilion
James Marsters came up through the Conservatoire route rather than via the university route, so it’s quite possible he never had heard the Latin term – except in its English translation of ‘a clean slate’.
3 March 2015 at 13:44 #38471Must admit I found Tennant’s Hamlet a bit underwhelming when I saw the televised version but I’m sure it had real power on the stage.
It had huge power on the stage; having seen both I entirely agree about the televised version. It lost a lot in the translation from stage to screen. I think everyone was so busy dialling down performances devised for massive theatres that they dialled it down a bit too much.
I would say David Tennant is a stage actor (possibly a great stage actor) who’s become successful in TV and film. He is and can be brilliant on telly – but he shines on stage.
@ichabod. Oh, he can be still. He can melt into a crowd, too. I remember the second scene of Hamlet, where we were watching Patrick Stewart give his first speech as King Claudius; and part of my mind was thinking, ‘bloody hell, shouldn’t Hamlet be on stage at this point?’.
Until Hamlet’s first line, when David Tennant, who’d previously been merely one of a group of actors, was suddenly just there. He’d let the focus stay on Patrick Stewart until it was his moment – and then he had the stage.
I’m not surprised the RSC keep giving him all the big parts (and were doing so before he became ‘that bloke on the telly’).
2 March 2015 at 21:32 #38462Not really. I thought this season was about the question ‘Doctor Who?’
2 March 2015 at 13:46 #38455@jimthefish and @ichabod
I’d like to add another point to the ‘lazy’ debate. Which is that, very often, the TV writer is neither lazy nor impatient – they just couldn’t get the story perfect in the time they had.
I can only speak to this from the acting side: the motto of the performing arts is very often ‘I don’t want it brilliant, I want it Tuesday.’ 🙂
Tuesday is the first night. Tuesday is the read-through. Tuesday is the first day on set. And if your performance (or script) is okay-ish on Tuesday, everyone will heave a huge sigh of relief. Even if you and everyone else knows you could have delivered something better – if only there’d been more time.
Because on Tuesday, the critics are in, or the crew is waiting and the money clock is ticking.
Personally, I think this is often the reason for second-season-itis. For the first series, the writer has often been pitching it, thinking about it, tweaking ideas for a long time: until the series finally got greenlit. For the second you’ve got a much more limited time frame – and you haven’t thought about that part of the series as much. So the second series really will get hit by the ‘Tuesday’ rule.
A lot of viewers can throw ‘lazy’ around because – while they know about deadlines – they don’t always know in their gut how an absolute deadline is going to affect the writer. Especially if they’re either amateur writers, or writers in another genre; where they’re either used to more flexible deadlines or the writing they do is less multi-faceted.
2 March 2015 at 02:00 #38445But then again IMDB is not exactly the most reliable source.
To put it mildly. I’m pretty sure Chris Chibnall has mentioned working with Sam Hoyle when they were storyboarding S2 – but IMDB only has him down as 2013. So it might be that they simply didn’t update the returning crew.
You’ve got a point about going to the US showrunner without having the writer’s room on board; but British TV has traditionally been much more keen on writer-led TV than the US was. The US model was producer-led TV (and the producer might or might not be a writer). British TV series often did come directly from a writer’s pitch, and the writer would then write the entire series.
2 March 2015 at 01:16 #38443Or you have expressed with no conviction or clarity.
In what way would that be? Sorry, but if my argument ‘lacks clarity’ the onus is on you to explain exactly why other people can understand it. Otherwise you are simply using debate tricks.
I love it when you come over all teachery 🙂
Another debate trick.
but narrowing the argument down to something you can defend, rather than what the debate is ain’t winning in any but the most pointless sense.
And another one.
Well, you’d know all about selectivity.
Now, what could that be … oh, let me think for a moment. Yes, it’s another debate trick.
that was your invention
No, that was the discussion between myself and @scaryb that you replied to. It’s also another debate trick.
Right, so – in the list of debate tricks (rather than actual debate). Your reply to my argument includes:
My argument is risible. My argument is teachery. My argument uses straw men (previous post). My argument uses selective quotation. My argument has been narrowed down. Oh, and I’m inventing stuff. Apparently I also used argument from authority.I’m not even going into the attempt to divert to irrelevant side issues. 🙄
This isn’t good enough, pedant. It really isn’t. I was having a discussion about realism, and the way Chibnall may have signalled that he’s not being entirely realistic. I have said, very clearly, that I haven’t yet been able to see the show. I also said that your reply might have missed the point I was trying to make – which was that if a writer has signalled that he’s not sticking to exact realism, then complaints based a lack of factual realism are a bit moot.
And in a forum where the debate is expected to be polite (if often robust), you try to win by accusing me of every debating sin in the book. While, I might add, committing quite a few of them yourself.
Not good enough.
1 March 2015 at 23:17 #38430But if he’d been flying a, say, Sopwith Camel then we’d quite rightly have to take issue with it.
Yes. True. If he’d been flying a Sopwith Camel, we’d definitely have to have taken issue. If, however, he’d been a fighter pilot with a Gloucester Gladiator, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Or an RN pilot with a Fairey Swordfish. 😉
I love real life – it’s so much messier than fiction. 😈
If you ask me, I think the Whovian equivalent to the courtroom procedural problem is the Baby Moon Dragon.
1 March 2015 at 22:57 #38429You’re confusing missing your point with finding it risible.
Not really. If you find my point risible, then you’ve probably either genuinely misunderstood it – or suspect you’re about to lose the argument and are trying to make your opponent angry by insulting them. 😀
Even setting aside that the vast majority of current viewers have no idea what Crown Court was
Which is why it was merely the first in a list of police/court procedurals. Bit of a selective misquote, that one.
He doesn’t seem to have grasped the fundamental principle of “if you want to break the rules, first you have to know them”.
Hmm. I’m not entirely sure you’ve grasped the fundamental principle of ‘doing research’. As it happens, I’ve seen a lot of Chris Chibnall’s work. I would rate his Who and Torchwood work as his weakest – he’s not Moffat. But then, very few people are (and they probably have the first name ‘Steven’). But I would hesitate to say that a TV writer and playwright with fourteen years of professionally produced experience doesn’t know the rules.
I’d also hesitate to say that the writer and producer of the first series of Law and Order: UK doesn’t have a decent working knowledge of court procedure, police procedure and the British legal system. They may then choose to break those rules for dramatic effect, but whether or not that works isn’t the same as ‘they don’t know the rules’.
He could have achieved exactly the effect he wanted by taking a real world case…
And if that’s not the story he wants to tell?
No matter how fast-and-loose (or not) you want to play with procedure (and nobody expects documentary standards – thanks for that straw man
Again, the idea that nobody expects documentary standards seems to rely on a lack of research. One of the most frequent criticisms of the first couple of episodes of Broadchurch 2 was that Chibnall was making a lot of ‘mistakes’ in basic court procedure. If that’s a straw man, it’s one that got popped on top of the bonfire and was blazing merrily away.
justifying rank poor writing
I’ll make my own mind up on that one. So far, you’ve said poor writing, @scaryb has said ‘generally good, but clunky in parts’ – and other people whose opinion I trust also liked Broadchurch 2. So I’ll have to see.
1 March 2015 at 09:27 #38411Well, that misses my point pretty comprehensively. Or possibly illustrates it, I dunno.
The problem isn’t the suspension of disbelief but that the story rested so heavily on the two lead QCs being such utter, abject, total and complete incompetents and the judge so totally unaware of basic of law…
I wonder how many adults in the UK don’t know that witnesses aren’t allowed to watch the court proceedings until they’ve given their own evidence? Very few, wouldn’t you say?
Because between Crown Court and Law and Order UK and Judge John Deed and various court cases whenever a soap feels the need to jack up viewing figures, we’ve all seen a naturalistic presentation of a court case.
So as soon as the witnesses are allowed in, we know that we’re not watching a realistic representation. It’s been done before. Flowers for the Judge by Margery Allingham, for example – but that was a novel, so she was able to say in a short forward that she knew perfectly well this does not happen.
So complaining that the judge is unaware of the basics of law (or the QC’s don’t know their job) is like complaining Alexander Armstrong is flying a Lancaster. It’s expecting realism again. In a story where the audience has already been given a massive signal that this part of the story is not realistic.
Realism is a genre where the stories could have happened. We should have guessed from the first series that Broadchurch isn’t quite in that genre (Ellie would never have been allowed to investigate a crime where her own family were witnesses and suspects). But that particular bit of non-realism is a common convention, so the audience let it slide.
It was pretty clear from Broadchurch 1 that Chibnall isn’t interested in a police procedural. He’s interested in the impact on a small, close-knit community of one of their own children being murdered. Broadchurch Two is about the impact of it being someone everybody knew and trusted.
Okay, haven’t seen it, can’t comment on the acting and writing of the court scenes as drama (rather than ‘how realistic are they as a representation of a UK court’) until I have. But…
Juries are devilishly difficult to convince of things at the best of times
Realism again, you see.
28 February 2015 at 23:43 #38397I’m fine with The Daemons.
28 February 2015 at 20:48 #38393The main thing that’s been attracting criticism is the lack of realism about the court room scenes.
Yes, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Television’s been wedded to this kitchen sink realism for so long that it’s become very difficult for a writer to say ‘realism really isn’t the best way of telling this part of the story’. So unless you’ve established from the very start of the series that certain things will be presented in a stylised way (such as Sherlock, with its on-screen texts in the very first episode) you. are. stuck.
Even in Doctor Who. You’ve got walking tree-creatures, inter-dimensional portals, comedy elves – and some b*gg*r is guaranteed to complain bitterly that the actor is flying a Lancaster bomber when it should have been a Halifax. 🙄
So it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of the complaints would be about something where it’s blatantly obvious that the writer must know how a courtroom really works – and has decided, for some reason, not to do it that way.
28 February 2015 at 17:15 #38375@craig – ahh, Craig?
PAUL McGann is Doctor Number Eight. MARK McGann is his brother.
His other brothers (those who are also actors – unbelievably, some of the McGanns aren’t professional actors) are Joe and Stephen, neither of whom played the Eighth Doctor. 😈
28 February 2015 at 17:01 #38371@scaryb – not ‘still’ so much as ‘fully intend to watch when I have time’. Fortunately, audiences held up well enough that they’re going for Series 3 – and fortunately for me, I have Series 2 recorded.
I couldn’t watch the first two episodes on broadcast, then when the first iffy reviews came in I decided that I was going to wait to watch until I could see the whole shape of the series. If you’ve got a drama (rather than a soap) you often can’t make sense of things until the finale. Chibnall being a Who writer, I thought he might well have decided to try that route.
The classic example for AG Who is, of course, Series 5. 🙂
28 February 2015 at 00:31 #38347I don’t really have a huge amount to say about Local Hero – not because I dislike it or anything; quite the opposite. It’s a little gem of a film.
It’s also a nice satire on ‘Scotland the fairytale’. The Americans come in and see this beautiful, idyllic, mythic land – and the people who actually live there are working two or three jobs to keep afloat. They can’t even afford to eat the lobsters they catch. No wonder all that money is so tempting.
It’s the Russian sailor who quotes the saying common to Northern England as well as to Scotland: ‘You can’t eat the scenery.’
It’s also a nice touch that the villagers aren’t all that delighted at the happy ending. Okay, there’ll be money and jobs and they’ll get to keep their homes as well. But for a moment, they thought they were going to be rich. It really would take people a wee while to realise that they did, in the end, get the better deal.
26 February 2015 at 15:28 #38319I’m just not sure it’s on Gallifrey.
Is that because of the sky colour? But we get green skies, red skies, orange skies on Earth, as well as our standard blue. Gallifrey had a war on – those sky trenches may well have affected the colour.
25 February 2015 at 09:59 #38292Mind you, I do wonder what Moffat had in mind if Christopher Eccleston had agreed to do the 50th.
Would he have decided the regeneration limit was the next producers problem? Or was he planning to use the faces seen in the BG Brain of Morbius and tell us that Hartnell wasn’t the first face, but the first incarnation to call himself ‘The Doctor’?
25 February 2015 at 09:47 #38291Therefore they know that at some stage (pretty soon) he is going to wangle at least 1 more regeneration,
No, they don’t. There are twelve regenerations. That means thirteen faces. That means they think all the Doctors from his first cycle are orbiting around Gallifrey.
They don’t know that the Tennant Doctor had vanity issues and regenerated into himself. 😉
[Which is why there’s such a problem in The Time of The Doctor – they have no idea that the Doctor is dying of old age; they think the Smith Doctor has one regeneration left.]
25 February 2015 at 09:32 #38288Okay, so did everything in the Xmas dream as-good-as-really-happen because they both remember it when they wake up (whenever that is), as a shared dream experience?
Yes, because if they didn’t both remember it a) the Doctor wouldn’t have known to race back to rescue Clara and b) Clara’s first words on waking up wouldn’t have been ‘Am I young?’
Nor would the Doctor realise he’d been given a second chance – because if he’d forgotten the lying scene, he’d still think Danny was alive. Nor would Clara realise that she can travel with him – because she’d think he was going back to live on Gallifrey and had just turned up to rescue her.
That very last scene where they’re awake (and going into the TARDIS) might be short, but the actions in it imply that they remember the revelation that they were both lying in the cafe. The Doctor would never ask Clara to travel with him if he thought it’d take her away from Danny, and Clara would never agree if she thought she was keeping him away from Gallifrey.
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