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7 October 2016 at 19:39 #54117
@missy Why, oh why, do some people carry on about racism?
Well, either you see why, or you don’t; if you don’t, you don’t. But once you do, you can never “unsee” it again, which IMO is a very, very good and long-overdue thing.
Let me be clear: I didn’t mean, above, that I disapprove of raising race issues about our entertainment (in this case, “Miss Peregrine’s Place”). Far from it. But the resulting discussions I’ve seen, while IMO more necessary than ever for the health of the culture I live in, are at a very raw place, and quickly become as harsh and frustrating as the daily news itself. America is still deep in the throes of thrashing out racial and ethnic issues; that doesn’t mean that we DW fans must thrash them out here too, on a discussion board valued as a friendly, stimulating, and pleasant place for conversation.
7 October 2016 at 19:00 #54116@missy A natural — swearer?! Now *I’ve* got the giggles, remembering bits from that film. He’s said that he picked up swearing from being around Burt Lancaster while they were filming “Local Hero”, way back when, but I must say I have my doubts — could he seriously mean that as a boy growing up in Glasgow, he’d rarely heard or used foul language? From what I’ve seen Glasgow’s not a prissy place . . . Anthony Bourdain did one of his shows on visit there, and said he loved the friendliness of the people, but that it was pretty rough, as Capaldi had also said himself (sotto voce) in an interview in 2014, I think.
For what it’s worth (probably close to nothing, as it’s hearsay and a good while past now), I once came across comments from a couple of women who’d worked with B.L. who said they’d found him a bully and an a cynical misogynist (there were stories that he’d gotten a female actor fired from a project after she’d called him on his nastiness). Capaldi spoke admiringly of working with Lancaster all those years ago, when he himself was still an impressionable kid (that was Capaldi’s first acting job), but by all accounts our current Doc behaves like a natural gentleman, so apparently he didn’t catch the nastiness. Maybe Lancaster was on his best behavior at the time, working outside of his own country. Except for the bad language.
Which, IMO, became the making of Malcolm Tucker, turning bad language into the ragged-fanged heart of TToI and “In the Loop”. (Funny, I always think of that title in my head as “In the Loup” — been watching a French cop series on Netflix lately with a murderous villain referred to from time to time as “a wolf”).
7 October 2016 at 08:13 #54112@winston Lucky devil!
I think a lighter season could be great — give rein to Capaldi’s sly, dry humor, although we’ll just have to supply the Explosive Tucker Profanity for ourselves . . .
6 October 2016 at 19:41 #54109@toinfinityandbeyond Oh, good; thanks for the link.
6 October 2016 at 18:35 #541076 October 2016 at 18:32 #54106@cathannabel Did you see any of the American remake of “The Returned”? Awful, awful, awful, like a badly cracked bell. I’m sure the producers would have just strung it out into six seasons if they could have . . . although even in the US, the idea of closed-ended series working for higher quality and an actual story has taken root. I await the promised third (and final) season of “The Leftovers” with some apprehension about how well they’ll be able to support the quality they’ve sustained so far and provide a satisfying conclusion. Contrary to the popular wisdom, failure is *always* an option.
@missy — That’s “Miss Peregrine etc.”? That’s kind of what I’ve been reading about it (or worse), so I haven’t yet seen it. The general opinion seems to be that it’s a criminal waste of Eva Green’s presence. There’s also a dispiriting wrangle going on in social media about whether it was racist of Tim Burton to have an all white cast — except for the villain, played by Samuel L. Jackson. SLJ has yet to weigh in on the matter himself, as far as I know.
4 October 2016 at 20:43 #54097Something interesting from Radio Times:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/5fa5d449-0c02-4839-846e-c4a999dbaba6
2 October 2016 at 19:29 #54092@janetteb I was disappointed by the recent Del Toro Crimson Peak.
Haven’t seen it yet — I was put off, really, by an interview with this director before CP was released, about how deeply involved he’d become in just playing around with monsters and horror scares on film. I think he told his one big story — and it is a big one — in “The Devil’s Backbone”, and again, more luridly and flashily and popularly, in “Pan’s Labyrinth”: the monstrosity and corruptive nature of Fascism and the legacies of the Spanish Civil War. But maybe I just prefer my zombies if they have a more focused political and cultural resonance.
@cathannabel The zombies are the context rather than the content I would say.
That hits the nail on the head, and also the problem, for me: the onus is then on the writers and actors to present human characters who are complex enough to interest me enough in their fates to care. Clearly, TWD does this for a great swathe of tv watchers — it has a huge following. So I guess all I can say is, I’ve been pretty much immune to it — probably from reading so much SF, the best of which is so often about a group of people trying to survive (and more) in a context of alien encounters and dangers that are themselves compelling puzzles in various ways (even Ripley’s monstrous alien makes a bit of sense when we realize it’s a mother monster defending her eggs). There’ve been so many zombie movies about the sociological ebb and flow of human “politics” in the face of societal and infrastructure breakdown — “The Road”, “Escape from New York”, “Mad Max”, etc. Adding zombies as the cause (or maybe the major effect?) doesn’t grab me. Some of comic turns around the idea have been entertaining, though.
Oh, except where the zombies themselves have an arresting context. I’m thinking of — was it, “The Serpent and the Rainbow”? A film about encountering vodun and zombies in Haiti? Sorry, my memory of the details is gone, but the look and feel of that movie were rich and scary enough to stay with me. A farmhouse on a hill with some assorted and drearily “representative normal people” inside and zombies roaming around outside doesn’t do it for me. It’s “Under the Dome” with monsters, gnashing what’s left of their teeth, outside.
“Zombies vs. seminarians”, now, that could be interesting. And I did like the first season of “The Return”, the French version — because it was so *French*, with long pauses for (I suppose) contemplating the tristesse of it all, and lots of hanging about smoking — or did I fill that part in on my own, from just about every other French film I’ve ever seen? Anyway, I think you’re right — the only cure for the eventual, inevitable Doldrums of the Living Dead is a closed-ending series, even if doesn’t actually arrive anywhere significant before the final fade.
There’s a small amateur-made (I think) movie I came across online, about a guy who’s been zombie-bitten and is struggling to carry a child (his?) to safety in an enclave of live people — before he himself becomes a zombie (and, presumably, eats the kid). I found it affecting, in a “Flowers for Algernon” way, because of the poignant tension between the inexorable extinction of his humanity pitched against his fatherly love. That’s a story, and a good one, IMO. But it’s about a dying human, not a boring, lurching corpse.
@blenkinsopthebrave I love Briers, too — and what a great clip! Shamble, shamble, clump clump clump . . . !
2 October 2016 at 08:44 #54082@missy “Miss Peregrine” opens here this weekend, and I’m going to see it asap — Burton’s work is always worth a look, IMO. And after “Penny Dreadful”, I’d follow Eva Green anywhere — well, almost.
@cathannabel @puroandson The zombie theme has always seemed to me to be hermetically sealed with nowhere to go but in circles, so I steer clear. Zombies now strike me as less entertaining versions of Audrey the carnivorous plant, “Feed me! Feed me!” And snapping and snarling all the time — what the heck? Predators on the hunt don’t indulge in frenzied threat-display; they sneak up and pounce, or charge and grab, with as little fuss and unnecessary expenditure of energy as possible . . . but of course Zombies have no physical energy economies (since they can keep going, while also rotting to bits, with or without food; whereas even vampires famish and fail if they’re prevented from feeding). But rational thinking doesn’t really apply, so never mind.
I love ghost stories, though, if they’re good. They offer much more interesting takes on post-death existence, and are damned hard to do well, too. Thinking of “The Woman in Black” as a recent example, “The Sixth Sense”, “The Devil’s Backbone” (a wonderful piece by del Toro, an early one), e.g. Ghosts have missions, persistence, urgency, goals even. They stick around because they have something to communicate, which means *they* have stories. That’s what makes them interesting, to me.
I guess I’ve always been more a fan of speculation about the supernatural, paranormal, or alien, than of plain old horror tales of the pursuing monster variety. Strokes and folks, as always.
2 October 2016 at 08:04 #54081@cathannabel Thanks for the recce — saw the Wilderpeople and enjoyed it very much, but I hadn’t heard of the Huppert film. Is it a new-ish one of hers? She’s always in interesting movies, though sometimes a tad too rarified for me. This one sounds attractive, though.
2 October 2016 at 07:58 #5408030 September 2016 at 06:50 #54048@pedant What’s vpn? I too have had a loving message from Sonja, so I’m a bit concerned about getting locked out.
28 September 2016 at 05:57 #54043@theconsultingdoctor Yes, Sherlock’s mind palace via Moffat is drug-induced hallucination, isn’t it? I don’t see it as a way of remembering things and ideas, which was the original intention of this mental structure as an educational device. It’s much more a twisty, almost artistic version of reality tripped through on drugs, which is a far cry from “and here’s where I keep the Dialogs of Plato, in this Louis XIV dresser of decorated with wooden inlays on themes from Greek vases” kind of thing (I dunno, I never tried the mind palace stratagem, but that’s how I imagine it).
The Doctor’s mental “strong room” or “storm room” is a completely accurate and unchanging replica of his Tardis’s console room, a refuge for thinking his way through a lethal danger, as we see it in “Heaven Sent”. I suppose both of these concepts are versions of the one (historically real) educational device, the “memory palace”. Clever Moffat; playful Moffat.
28 September 2016 at 05:29 #54042@missy Great; thanks for checking! So different for most of us, with our various notions of “the afterlife” where we’ll supposedly meet our lost relatives and friends and lovers again in some sort of — happy, timeless stasis? For a space wanderer who has never met a real “God” or glimpsed the paranormal — an existential space wanderer still wondering what it’s all about — dead is (mostly) dead, and gone is (mostly) gone. And it goes on as good as forever, in terms of human life spans anyway. He says he remembers everyone, which might help explain his restlessness and adventure-seeking: sitting quietly and actually *remembering* your lost ones is one thing. Storing them away in your mind in (more or less) perpetuity while you dash from peril to peril — so that you rarely have time or occasion to look back — that would be something else again.
Well, that’s the Doctor, with too much memory stored up to ever begin to face, maybe. So much (add in all the stories we don’t see, the adventures in between and their people), the sheer weight of accumulated incident — whew! If you really want to crack the Doctor, you’d catch him in a trap like the Confession Dial, but *with no puzzles to solve* so that he’d have nothing to do but remember his long, long train of memories and losses.
26 September 2016 at 07:35 #54035@blenkinsopthebrave @nerys Yep; me too.
26 September 2016 at 07:34 #54034@winston I always check in on Holmes versions, to see what other writers/performers find in him. Since the character as ACD wrote him is nearly 100% rationality, people project all sorts of interesting ideas and emotions onto it in more current interpretations. I’m reading (well, skimming) the latest of Laurie King’s meditations on Sherlock’s possible love life in his old age, THE MURDER OF MARY RUSSELL, which I’m finding pretty boring, frankly; I can’t work up much enthusiasm for this extended exploration of Mrs. Hudson’s mildly criminal past and its consequences. But King is a solid writer, so I always look in, at least.
Moffat’s modern Holmes is, for me, not much related to the Holmes I absorbed when I read ACD’s work in my early teens; but that’s okay, I don’t mind when a newer version is well done in its own terms. As Ernest Hemingway, I think, said when somebody lamented to him that “The Sun Also Rises” had been wrekced by its cinematic version, “No, it hasn’t; there it is, on that shelf.” The original Holmes is always there, safe and sound and barely human, no matter what interpretations are made of him latterly. Myself, I love him for his aloofness, his beautiful human embodiment of a hawk with a cold, gold eye observing human affairs with super-human keenness. Brilliant. Maybe matchless.
Been reading some books about hawks, falconry and other forms of “domestication” of predators that aren’t, really, since what’s truly wild tends to stay wild, in the hands of those who respect wildness. Mind you, Holmes puts himself at the service of the enforcement of law, which I suppose is a kind of domestication . . . otherwise, he could well have been — well. Moriarty.
26 September 2016 at 07:18 #5403323 September 2016 at 19:55 #54003@missy Thanks for thanks; I think the full line, though, is “I’m so sick of losing people”, and refers in the first place to Ashildr — ? He doesn’t actually *lose* in the larger sense — the monster is dealt with, the people on the train are rescued and the mummy soldier is freed, etc., usually (“Sleep No More” is an exception — he and Clara get away with their lives). Of course, in the long, long, long run, he’ll lose everything — just like the rest of us, and in “Heaven Sent” he “lost” this way over and over again — but not permanently, so that doesn’t “count”.
22 September 2016 at 03:29 #53989@arbutus “Catch Me” is a good pic, too. And Ab-Fab is something my husband and I used to watch with delight and quote lines from, as my whole family used to do with the Goon Show!
22 September 2016 at 01:53 #53987@theconsultingdoctor A “brain attic”! That made me laugh! I didn’t remember it from reading the Holmes canon way back there someplace, so thanks. Given what attics tend to look like (and how hot or icy cold they usually are, not to mention musty), I take the high road, thanks — the “palace”. But you’ve actually tested this concept and used it — I’m very impressed!
he explains to John how he only stores things in his mind that are really useful. He “deletes” everything else.
Cybermen, yeah, but also the Doctor himself, who says he’s sometimes deleted things from his memory, presumably to make room for so many years’ worth of experience, although I don’t think the original users of this educational tool envisioned throwing stuff out; you were supposed to just keep adding things, building a retrievable filing system, but one sized for human minds and human lives at the time, the TL understanding and knowledge.
There is (probably) no way to think at this speed in real life
Hard to tell; people who survive accidents and physical emergencies sometimes report a distinct slowing of time, sometimes so that they were able to organize the response that saved their (or someone else’s) life; but, compared to what Moffat’s Sherlock or Doctor do, that’s small potatoes.
21 September 2016 at 08:23 #53982@missrori She certainly did not think her life was worth risking the Web of Time or burning a billion billion hearts….
True: “I was dead,” she says, and not needing anybody to do anything for her any more.
The Hybrid was destined to do what it did because it had to heal its heart(s). Her heart did not need healing…but his did.
That’s an very interesting approach — that the underlying the purpose of his actions wasn’t really to save Clara or punish the TLs, but to “heal his hearts” so that he could move on again as the Doctor, no longer the compulsive guardian of his mayfly because memory, being gone, no longer compels him.
20 September 2016 at 08:36 #53975@puroandson Hi, Son Of, I do know the movie you mention — I’m not a Hanks fan, although I appreciate some of his work. This movie, about the emergency passenger-jet landing on the Hudson River, has been getting very enthusiastic reviews here. It’s apparently *not* a slam-bang thriller-type approach to the situation but a down-to-earth take on an event in which *many* people just did their demanding jobs well, contributing to a successful resolution. I’m definitely up for that one, which just arrived here in my city. I enjoy stories about people working together toward a worthy goal instead of stories about The One, the Only, the Special Special Hero who sets things to rights single handedly, usually by blowing things up and slaughtering people.
That’s why I like DW so much — light on the up-blowing and slaughter, focus on the figuring-things-out and seeing more than one side of a situation stuff.
“House of Cards”, English original, was wonderful in a squirmy, witty way — aaarrgghhh, politics! Can’t live with it, can’t live without it . . . might as well have some fun! And Buffy was an eye-opener for me, too — as was The West Wing. We do get some very good entertainment these days, and, thanks to the internet, also the fun of discussing it and enhancing the pleasure of it, on boards like this.
19 September 2016 at 08:44 #53970@puroandson @pedant I have yet to start Rectify; I have a sort of visceral recoil reaction to American southern accents, believe it or not, cuz it always sounds like beastly Texas to me, and I’ll have no truck with that place that I can avoid. But will turn to Rectify before long, given the enthusiasm here for it.
As for “Under Done”, what a worn and weary load of — Come ON, a sealed off town with a big mean greedy car dealer, or whatever that guy was, called “Big Jim”? Not another demonstration of how bullies stomp their way to the top in any encapsulated “representative” population . . . I went out and skimmed the book in the bookstore to see if the story went anywhere, and it did sort of, but so what. Urgh. Just so *annoying*.
I love Billie Bobby Millie Brown in Stranger Things — I want lots more Millie Billie, lots. And what I want to know is, when the heck is The Leftovers coming back? Did anyone see “The Night of . . . “, a closed series based on a UK original, the name of which I don’t know. It was ruthlessly grim and sad, but the writing and the cast were wonderful. Right now — the Swedish original “Wallander” series, very good; “Sense8”, went action-hero nuts late in the 1st series, but I’ll finish it; watching series 4 of “Longmire”, filmed locally from good modern western novels by somebody Johnson, but the 4th season went to Netflix, which I didn’t subscribe to at the time, so I’m catching up.
19 September 2016 at 08:21 #53969@jgalt7 I love the idea too, but I’m afraid I concur with the others as far as any such child being “the hybrid” (and in fact is River still just a human to begin with?). Personally, I don’t think the Doctor having an unknown child of his own would work well — he’s sometimes a sort of fatherly presence to his companion, and people have enough of a problem with that connection. Would he be a good dad, or a distant and distracted one, or a Doctor to distracted to do his Doctorly adventuring, etc.? As it is, there are perplexed rumblings from the fans over Susan, the granddaughter, and the complete lack of interest he shows in her fate (in real world terms, the lack of interest by the more recent show runners and writers in exploring that potential relationship any further and in fact just “forgetting” it and hoping we do, too).
I look at it this way: the YA writer usually has to figure out how to get the young heroine’s parents out of the way so she can be free to have the adventure of the story. Similarly, it’s very rare to see an adult hero of many adventures with a wife and/or family. The adventurer needs to be relatively unattached as a long-term proposition, or the whole story becomes *about* issues of attachment (12/Clara, at the end, without a family tie, pushed this to an extreme with a *toxic* attachment that had to be disassembled and forgotten by one party to it). Better a rolling stone, a loose cannon, a freewheeling idiot-savant in a box, whirling around in time and space getting into trouble.
Until somebody wants to take a crack at writing the Doctor as he is now, with a child of his own . . . hybrid or otherwise.
19 September 2016 at 07:58 #53968@theconsultingdoctor I don’t think Sherlock’s “memory palace” or “mind palace” and the Doctor’s internalized console room are the same concept, though. I looked up “memory palace” because I recalled it as strictly a mental construct built as a locator of memories, originally an educational tool in Ancient Greece. I don’t remember exactly how Sherlock used his version of this (hmm, where *did* I put that memory, now — I only have a sort of memory hut, at this point), but the Doctor’s mental console room isn’t about memory exactly. Doesn’t he call it his “Strong Room” or maybe “Storm Room”, the impregnable mental fortress to which he retreats in his mind when he’s turned it up to high speed so as to outpace an oncoming real-world doom.
As we see it in HS, he goes there not to remember anything in particular, but to *think*, very fast, about how to get himself out of extreme peril — like falling after jumping out of a castle window; or figuring out how to escape from the Confession Dial by not actually escaping the Veil at all, but by accepting its attack.
One mental structure, seems to me, functions as a library of memories where clues might be discovered by closer observation; the other, as a retreat in which to reflect and strategize in (relative) safety around an immediate peril that he must escape. So I’m thinking Moffat was playing with the idea of two different sorts of mental constructs that very very bright people might build with their excess mental power to serve their own distinct purposes. I think he’s been fascinated by ideas about what might be going on in such extraordinary minds, but being a very bright guy himself, speculates beyond the quite human, if Ancient, “memory palace” idea to something more alien, perhaps — a brain within a brain, that thinks faster than human thought while at the same time erecting impenetrable protective walls around itself.
18 September 2016 at 18:05 #53958@blenkinsopthebrave @janetteb RED DWARF yes yes yes yes yes yes . . . what’s the keyboard symbol for “infinty”?
17 September 2016 at 18:15 #53951@missy — “. . . unlike Babylon 5”? I tried B7 too, some time ago, and didn’t care for it; “dated” sounds right, but I can’t remember enough about it now to recall in what ways I found that too.
I don’t recall “the Shadows” — but I tend to blank out anything about spiders.
17 September 2016 at 01:00 #53941Something from BBC news, about what all the Doctors have to know how to work with — since the Doctor so seldom uses weapons:
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160916-dont-blink-first-the-power-of-a-stare
The article made me think of them, and how Directors use this too, to convince us that the Doctor is *powerful* without making a physical threat.
16 September 2016 at 19:45 #53940Very nice!
15 September 2016 at 09:27 #5393614 September 2016 at 07:51 #53932@puroandson I’ve always felt — well, since maturity, whenever that was (I hope) — that Americans of the US have a terrible problem with the whole idea of childhood. Our culture is so youth-centered, with so many people fighting tooth, nail, and bank-account against every indication of middle age (let alone old age!), that we essentially pit ourselves *against* kids (maybe not our own, but kids in general) in a kind of forlorn competition, and it makes us come off as weirdly jealous of children who naturally own (temporarily) the state that we have been groomed to covet. So we short-change them as a class, underfunding every aspect of public education at least.
That persistent quest to drive down the cost of education is one of most shameful aspects of this wretched culture of mine (I can’t pretend I wasn’t born and raised here, although I was lucky enough to benefit by several mitigating factors). I recently came across an article (New York Review of Books, I think) in which the author asserted that one reason that many relatively wealthy white Americans of both parties hate to see “their” tax money go to public education is that those funds will help *all* students — including, heaven forbid, non-white kids who might get scholarships and better school supplies, schools, and teachers out of it.
And I can’t seriously deny that this might well be, if not the whole explanation (hardly), a damn good part of it. That bloviating B.S. about how wonderful “we” are is American Exceptionalism (we are *so* special that normal rules and values just don’t apply to our more appalling actions), and it’s a blight on this country that keeps us from mending our worst faults, or even *seeing* them.
I am not in a good mood tonight; some wine is in order, I think. And cat-watching, except that they’ve gone to sleep, lazy little beasts . . .
14 September 2016 at 07:11 #53930@puroandson Can’t tell you exactly what average grade school teacher pay is, but I know it’s not good. Universities, better, but that depends on your title — profs still do pretty well most places; associates, graduate assistants, adjuncts of any kind, badly. There’s a huge scandal at LIU right now, the Brooklyn campus (that’s Long Island University) because the new administrator offered a lousy new contract to the faculty union, with pay cuts and so on, and then *locked them all out* — meanwhile promising the students (this school costs a student $40,000 – $50,000.00 per year) that faculty would be “replaced” by comparable teachers offering the same level of education as the profs. Only the “teachers” who showed up first day of classes (not all of them did) were admin staff who’d been assigned to teach classes in fields they know nothing about. Some of them apologized to the students and left. The students are now on strike.
I got this from Amy Goodman’s radio program, “Democracy Now”, with interviews with staff and students, today. And, as it’s the US, race is of course a factor. The Brooklyn campus of LIU has mostly non-white students; the Post campus, on Long Island, has mostly whites — and pay grades there are considerably higher than pay for comparable positions at Brooklyn. What a surprise.
My country is a disgrace, and will remain a disgrace until these issues and disgustingly biased practices are addressed and righted. And I doubt that I’ll live anywhere near long enough to see that.
13 September 2016 at 07:13 #53927@puroandson Gawd, sounds like Heaven (though not, obviously, for people doing the actual work, under far too much pressure). At least your government is trying to upgrade curriculum, instead of demanding tests and evaluations all over the place but supplying nothing (or very little) useful in the way of curriculum updating and upgrading, let alone better (and more expensive) teacher selection and teacher training. Our public education system is a train wreck these days, in so many places and so many ways . . . Do your universities have to have remedial classes for freshmen because reading and writing is so poor among High School graduates? We have ’em — taught by “adjunct” lecturers or by graduate students, paid badly, non-tenured, and without benefits; this is what I’ve been hearing from friends in academe, and if people here know of counter-examples, I’d love to hear about them.
Here in New Mexico (which, around the time it was made a State in the Union, had a first class higher ed situation), good teachers go teach someplace that pays a decent wage, and good professors get lured away to Texas universities, which are extremely rich, as ours are not. Some say it all went to hell because the ranchers and miners and car dealers didn’t (and still don’t) want to see an educated work force here — to them, education meant “communism”. You can understand why once you find out that there were cowboys out west trying to organize themselves into unions in the late 1890’s. Their working conditions were appalling and their pay poor. Teach ’em to read and think, and you never know what crazy ideas they’ll get into their heads . . .
13 September 2016 at 03:57 #53925@mudlark @puroandson @pedant et al, great responses; thanks. You’re all right, my “analysis” is an example of “overthinking” stuff from a start that was sketchy at best. Well, that’s one way the Long Delay gets to me, I suppose. I should be made of stuff both sterner and less cynical, perhaps. Or I could blame US politics — currently more than enough to drive anyone round the bend. So let’s put that one down as “bonkers” in an off-the-charts way. I like all of your insights much better.
Puro solo, on the Doctor deliberately rejecting privilege (that the other TLs would see as his/theirs by right) by walking (or running) away from “Presidency”, on Gallifrey or probably anyplace else — people described as rebels tend to have big problems with authority, don’t they? If you can recognize the abuse of authority by others as such, and know yourself to have been raised to be one of those others, there’d likely be not just a touchiness about its exercise even by yourself, for fear of getting it wrong and abusing it too, without even realizing it (or, worse yet, realizing it and excusing it). He’s certainly got reason to be cautious in that respect by this point in his lives, if not well before.
12 September 2016 at 08:55 #53914@puroandson I don’t recall him “serving up fodder for their reverence”?
I put that clumsily — I didn’t mean that the Doctor was deliberately putting on a show to impress, but rather that his actions would become the stuff of more legends about him as a hero. He fulfills the role they expect of him — war hero, Time Lord, rebel who sides with the people rather than with his TL peers. And he’s also banking on them to be his witnesses if need be, while endangering them by being there in the first place. As you say, He was right there standing beside them. Yes; and they were willing to stand *in danger*, alongside him. The pilot of the gunship appeals to the locals to stand away from him, and they refuse to budge — but that pilot is showing more concern about them than the Doctor shows by not ordering them to move away from him. 12 hasn’t turned them into warriors, as Davros charged — but he accepts them as possible cannon fodder should things turn nasty (well, nastier than they did). This doesn’t, IMO, make him a bad guy; it’s just who he is, at that moment.
Why go to the barn in the first place? Why not go right to the Citadel and call Rassilon out there, without putting innocent locals in the (possible) line of fire as at the barn? Sure, the Doctor needed to rest, planning how to get old of the extraction chamber, because that’s really all he has in mind — getting Clara out of Trap Street alive. Everything else — other people’s risks and safety, even his need for revenge for the Confession Dial ordeal — takes a back seat to that. If he weren’t so single-mindedly obsessed with protecting Clara, even after death (as she herself rightly protests later), maybe he would realize that by waiting in the barn he’s putting the people who gather there at risk. People do tend to die around the Doctor, and nobody knows that better than he does. He is, as usual, unarmed by preference and prepared to be killed if the soldiers don’t take his side. That’s all very well, but it makes him completely unable to actually protect those people from Rassilon should Rassilon kill him on the spot, and then choose to have the civilian witnesses eradicated.
For me, the barn scene does not redound to the Doctor’s credit. He *should* send the women and kids, at least, away, as the pilot suggests. But he doesn’t. There’s a strong whiff of class privilege here — the Officer ordering the battle lines with the country folk as part of his army (except that they are unarmed and helpless); the Time LORD taking the stance of protector for people he might not survive to protect, let alone avenge. The Sheriff in “High Noon”, yes; but also the Lord (however temporarily) of the Manor. Those people are there to serve his only true purpose, which is controlling the situation so he can rescue Clara.
Along the way, of course, he simply consigns Rassilon and the Council into outer space, as coldly as you might tell a servant to walk your dog because you don’t have time to do it yourself; and that’s probably a help to the rural people outside the Citadel, since Rassilon is clearly a crazy tyrant. Which is not to say that another bunch of high-falutin’ thugs in tall collars won’t replace him and the Council with an authority little better — but the Doctor *doesn’t care*. He doesn’t care what comes next. All he wants to do is to use the extraction chamber, grab a neural blocker, and get Clara someplace safe, and blank, for her.
In my view, what all this does is *not* make the Doctor a careless aristo throwing his weight around with no concern for the consequences. What it does is strengthen the most important point of the episode: the ruinous, destructive force of obsession. He’s *not* thinking about “the people”, and he should be. In his usual frame of mind, he *would* be. But he’s been twisted by the power of the Clara connection, and he finally sees this, regains his true perspective, and submits to the breaking of that ruinous bond. I think “Look how far I went” also applies to the barn situation, the Council, and Rassilon, as well as shooting the General. The Doctor has gone very, very far — from himself, the “idiot” who stops by and helps and moves on. That’s what obsession does. It not only objectifies its object; it deforms the obsessive as well.
This is a scathing indictment, if you care to look at it that way, of the idealization of “romantic love” in popular art. “I loved him/her so much that I forgot everything else and risked all, thereby turning myself into a monster of selfish need, destructive (at least potentially) to all around me except (but sometimes including) the one I loved.” It’s Moffat’s answer to demands for a Jane-and-Rochester love story about the Doctor and his (human) companion. You want it? Here it is. And it’s a glorious, awful spiral toward mutual destruction that threatens to rip all of space and time to pieces AND turns the Doctor into a monster of indifference to all but his beloved.
*She* has to kick him hard to restore his sense of right and wrong. And it works; because *real* love, not the romantic B.S. about it, means you *listen* to the one you love. You see that person, and you hear that person, and you put the obsessiveness aside and accede to that person’s justified demands of you. That’s what I meant to say. I don’t know if it’s what Moffat meant, of course, but it’s what I see here, for what that’s worth.
Speaking of rattling on! And, by the way, I think it’s amazing that your Aussie history courses cover so much modern history — after your objections to the way education has been screwed up there! If only US ed at any level short of college taught recent history like this! When I was teaching, at least, history/Social Studies didn’t get past WWI in Secondary School — too much political dissention, even then (mid-sixties) in the US.
11 September 2016 at 07:20 #53909@mudlark @pedant Maybe because the Doctor himself doesn’t seem to grasp it until pretty late in the day — in “Heaven Sent”, I think, when he figures out that the hybrid secret is what his torturers are after, and who would that be other than the TLs. I must be, you know, slow . . . well, maybe I am. Thanks for prodding me to look back and think it through.
10 September 2016 at 05:58 #53905@puroandson Son of Puro, Yes, “they’ll kill you” means what you ultimately said. It’s really hard to explain it so much for that kind of stops it being absorbed at the point it’s written.
Oh, absolutely — that’s why I’m still chewing these issues over many months later — I don’t think about it that way while I’m watching an episode, especially not the first time. I just want the impact, unfiltered by my own thoughts as much as that’s possible. I’m not there, in the first place, for my thoughts, but to be as observant and receptive as I can re the thoughts of others — the creative crew, the actors, the writers. The rumination and chains of speculation come later, particular in a setting like this where there are so many good minds putting their own thoughts about DW out there.
@winston Your own contributions ain’t too dusty either, friend.
10 September 2016 at 05:47 #53904@winston He won’t ask her to do anything he isn’t prepared to do himself. I love the 12th Doctor.
Yup. My guy too. “See me” becomes “I hear you”. Long sigh of satisfaction.
10 September 2016 at 02:33 #53897@missy I liked Bab-5 too, very much, and was sorry to see it go. Thing about the columnist’s slightly bitter nostalgia for “original” Star Trek is that he’s objecting to increased commercialization of the show in more recent times (spin-offs, dolls (“action figures”, for boys, cuz gods forbid etc.), novelizations and books, more $ and polish in production, and so on), as a loss of its earlier slap-dash, improvisational qualities (those salt and pepper shakers Bones used) that made ST this precious, secret joy to only those viewers clever and passionate enough to glom onto it — I mean, see its reckless, generous, idealistic heart.
He doesn’t like sharing ST now, in so many (perhaps attenuated and compromised) forms with so many newer fans, although he knows it’s “either share it or lose it” in an era dominated by mass marketing values. Isn’t that a lot like what we hear from the self-identified fans of DW who nonetheless moan constantly about how “terrible” it’s become lately?
10 September 2016 at 02:19 #53896@arbutus — I agree that the Donna Solution (! if we can call it that) was awful; on the other hand, look what an excellent stimulus it was to the beauty of “Hell Bent”, how many years later? The Doctor tries to do a Donna, is rebuked in spades by Clara, and *bang* — right before our eyes, the character of the Doctor grows, because this time he sees the injustice that has been pointed out to him (it’s not as if Donna didn’t try). Of course it’s not right for him to decide against Clara’s strenuous objection, blot out her memories, even in order to spare her danger, and he not only sees this, but immediately acts on it.
Look at what that rebound against the Donna thing does: it gives Moffat a chance to to demonstrate (not just *say*) that he himself has grown, in his understanding of the messages of feminism, and that he insists on DW itself share in that growth by the way the problem is resolved. And the contrast between the Donna incident and the Clara decision also shows us some other truths, if we care to look. For one thing, the change in the Doctor’s approach tells us that yes, his attachment to Clara is something very special (as S8-9 have told us all along) in that he was sorry to memory-wipe Donna, but he realizes that he can not do that to Clara — IMO, because she’s become, over their time together, more real and compelling a *person*, independent of him and his ideas of her, than other companions have normally been. With this, a complementarity is created and established: in the Doctor’s company, Clara grew into her own “Doctor” capacities. And in Clara’s company, the Doctor grew into a (comparative) super-being fully aware and *respectful* of the subjective validity of his human human companion.
Which also pretty much refutes Missy’s gibes about humans — or this human, at any rate — being the Doctor’s “pets”. Not that he doesn’t treat them as if they’re pets sometimes, but when push comes to shove in “Hell Bent”, he realizes he must treat Clara not as a precious object to be preserved at all costs, but as an equal, entitled to keep her own memories and run her own risks.
None of which would work so well without the Donna Disaster as a backdrop, clearly called up in viewers’ minds (“I’ve done it before — it won’t hurt this time”) as a contrast to what happens in “Hell Bent”. But that also means, to me anyway, that there are no wispy trails of memory for Donna, post-wipe, or at least none that she’s able to follow up to any degree (without the head explosion thing happening).
Neat; really, really neat: the Right hand realizes, explicitly, just what the Left hand did, all those episodes ago, and does better this time. Now, that’s what I call true character-development. Of course with the Doctor, though, there’s always the possibility of regression sometime in the future, for some other show-runner’s reasons. But for now, this is part of why I found S8-9 so deeply satisfying. Not everything worked — it never does. But the things that worked were Big things, as I see such matters, and they worked brilliantly. I miss Moffat already, and he’s not even gone yet . . . !
10 September 2016 at 01:43 #53895Thanks for all this good stuff, very helpful in perspective and backstory departments.
@pedant so true about Moffat’s economy with words — I think much of the criticism of his plots as being too “convoluted” (usually linked to some resentful remark about “showing off how clever he is”) really boils down to “How dare he make me feel not as smart as he is?” Missing the (rather obvious) point that a good part of why Steven Moffat has been show-running Who is that he *is* smarter than a lot of DW’s fans (which is saying quite a bit, considering that DW fans tend to be pretty smart folks to begin with). Yes, Son of Puro — you *always* need to listen carefully, when Moffat’s in the mix. If you can’t keep up, he trusts you to catch up at least.
@mudlark If the non-Time Lord population of Gallifrey feared that the Time Lords might kill the Doctor it was not because he was thought to be the hybrid; they would have had ample opportunity to attempt to do so earlier if that had been the case. I suspect that their reasons had more to do with the outcome of the Time War.
Great analysis altogether, but why “they’ll kill you!” isn’t that clear to me. I could understand “HE will kill you”, meaning Rassilon, who has plenty of reason to hate the Doctor, and who has engineered the whole Torture-castle-Confession-Dial situation to get at the secret of the hybrid and then just left the Doctor there to die (and die, and die, and die). Rassilon himself could be scared enough of the Doctor to try to kill him, and certainly shows willing at the barn in “Hell Bent”.
But, “they” will kill you? All the Council (or all the TLs)? He’s been a rebellious damn nuisance but has also helped rescue his home planet, and the TLs from their own folly, in the Time War, so . . . Son of Puro is right that heroes have been killed by their own “leaders” in history for being dangerously “upright” and also popular. Does “they’ll kill you” really mean, *while Rassilon still dominates them*, the Council Lords will do what he wants and kill you (or let *him* kill you)? Or are they out for his blood too? Probably.
Maybe the real threat that all the TLs feel from the Doctor is his refusal (several times in the past, and again in “Hell Bent”) to validate their high and mighty status thing by accepting either their authority, or the “Presidency” of anything for more than a short time (for his own purposes). And yet — as Son of Puro notes, the common folks revere him, and when he faces down everything the TLs throw at him in the barn scenes in “Hell Bent”, he serves up fodder (his actions) for their reverence (new stuff-of-legemds re the Doctor), not any sort of warmth toward them (let alone concern for possible damage to them during his face-offs with his opponents). in context, that can be taken as part of his single-minded “madness” around retrieving Clara from death, a foreshadowing of how reckless — about others — he might be if he continues as part of the Clara/Doctor hybrid.
@mudlark That’s my favored kind of history, too — what’s *behind* the legends that get handed down as official truths and recorded in official documents; what people experienced (so far as we can discover) as well as what they did, and not just the leadership, either.
9 September 2016 at 03:31 #53880Read this in the NYT today at the coffee shop, and suddenly I realized where I’ve been hearing this melancholy, slightly embittered and resentful tone lately. You all will recognize it too — and look at the elements that the author cites as the causes of his discontent:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/opinion/who-stole-my-star-trek.html
How much to they apply to the long saga of The Doctor, do you think?
8 September 2016 at 08:12 #53869@puroandson again, Son — oops, I didn’t respond to the bird/algorithm connection you raised. I don’t think it’s breaking the wall — the Doctor is either talking to the Veil, or to fantasy-Clara in his mental image of the Tardis console room, or (after he gets through the asbandium wall) to the TLs through the Confession Dial, on the theory that they were listening the whole time he was stuck in the castle with the Veil and can still hear what he’s saying because the Dial, back in its normal physical form, is there with him. Only (in Heaven Sent, that is) when he says, “I’m nothing without an audience!” is he breaking the fourth wall — speaking directly to us, with a conspiratorial glance in our direction.
Well, he knows he’s a legend as well as a man, like Robin Hood — “You know who I am, you’ve heard the stories!” For that instant, he exists both in his own immediate story, and in ours as viewers receiving the story. So the Doctor, our clever boy, earns that magician’s coat, doesn’t he?! Both of them, the black one and the burgundy, and apparently midnight blue in S10.
8 September 2016 at 07:59 #53868@missrori @winston The companions as heroes — yes, that’s the other side of the coin, isn’t it? The Doctor turns his companions into “weapons” or at leasts into adventurers fit and willing to risk their lives to help him. But he also, apparently not by design but by the nature of his life’s special qualities and requirements, calls out the heroism innate in them, making them more than they were when they first joined him, more than they knew they were or thought they could be.
Not bad, for a daft old man rattling around the universe in a phone booth . . .
8 September 2016 at 07:49 #53867@puroandson — Son of Puro, The combination of the Doctor and the forecast causing a problem. He was scared or nervous or frightened and then he also knew “they would kill” him (lady who boarded the young boys).
Okay, I hadn’t made that connection, thinking instead that if he originally fled Gallifrey because he was afraid that the hybrid “forecast” meant *him* so he was afraid of finding out in some terrible way that it *was* him, and that if he didn’t leave, he would destroy his home world (per the prophecy) just by being there. It didn’t occur to me that he was afraid that the TLs would kill him over it, assuming he was the hybrid because — wait, who knew, back then, about the prophecy? Was it told only to him, or was it common knowledge among the TLs so that they were in fact a danger to him because they knew about it and thought he was this dangerous hybrid? But why would they? Unless one of his parents was in fact human, and everyone knew that, so he might be a TL-human hybrid; and I thought that human mom thing isn’t canon now, if it ever was? Hmm.
And why does the “House Mother” at the barn tell him that they’ll kill him? Is all of Gallifrey in on the TLs’ plot that got the Doctor into the Dial? Not likely; so that does seem to mean that when he ran from Gallifrey the first time, it was because he thought the TLs wanted to kill him because he was the hybrid. But how did they know, and why the heck are they so desperate now to get “the secret” of the hybrid if they already knew it was him back then? I’m confused about this, probably because I don’t remember when (before S9) this hybrid issue was introduced, or discussed — if it was? It just feels a bit glitchy to me, because I can’t sense of it.
That’s part of why I can’t call “Heaven Sent” perfect, much as I love the episode for its great virtues: something just doesn’t quite fit, there, for me.
On the other hand, I’m not a manic fan, and it doesn’t bother me that much. The wonderful tone and execution of “Heaven Sent” and the deviously brilliant outcome of “Hell Bent” just make that hybrid blurriness insignificant to me as a viewer and a fan. Still, I should probably do what you did, Son of Puro, and just *listen” instead of watching . . . so I will, and see if that clarifies the matter of the hybrid for me.
@puroandson You wrote a whole thing? Is this you, Puro Solo; and what did you write?
5 September 2016 at 21:47 #53853@mersey Lem is amazing — the thing about “Solaris” is that opaque and subjective as it seems, it’s been made into movies twice that I know of — it exerts some kind of pull on movie folks, but how? I loved the first film version that I saw (Russian?), and the US one was pretty good too . . . for some reason, I tend to think of Doris Lessing’s SF in tandem with Lem’s, but I haven’t read either recently enough to explain (maybe) why . . .
4 September 2016 at 17:30 #53848@puroandson @pedant An algorithm as a sort of scientific prophecy, then? Like, analysis of data yields a pattern that means the data will add up to or produce a certain result in future (or a result that is already coming or has come into being)? So, a prophecy with scientific teeth to it; but not absolute certainty, so “forecast” is a really good word, meaning in this case, such and such a storm is coming except maybe it might veer off or dissipate first, but it’s likely to hit.
Great — that makes much more sense to me, and turns that problem into a non-problem. Although, thinking about it, seems to me that tying “I ran because I was scared” back specifically to the “prophecy” right there would have gone some distance toward helping to set up the Doctor + Clara = Hybrid thing in Hell Bent much more securely. I’ve seen a number of complaints from fans that the whole Hybrid Prophecy concept wasn’t handled crisply enough to work well in that final episode, and the blame for a degree of murkiness about it assigned to the writing, ie Steven Moffat — either because he’s such a terrible writer that he couldn’t do better (Sarcasm, mine, With A Capital S), or because he has a habit of preferring to keep things a bit hazy rather than make them too clear-cut to be easily altered later on in the series for plot reasons etc.
There was a good deal of kerfuffle about the Hybrid issue on discussion boards at the time, so I have reason to suspect that there is some clumsiness about the way it was handled that bothered a lot of viewers, and that that accounts in large part for the down-rating of Hell Bent as a falling-off in quality after the high of Heaven Sent. So there’s some kind of a speed-bump in the road there, IMO, that interferes with what should have been a clearer run up to the Doctor + Clara = Hybrid reveal. And I see that as a flaw, not because it bothered me much — it didn’t because so much else went so right — but because it does seem to have bothered a number of fans enough to partly spoil Hell Bent for them.
Anyway, thanks for the clarification.
4 September 2016 at 06:58 #53845@missy Oh, don’t get me wrong — I think the episode works brilliantly in almost every respect, but I am loathe to apply the word “perfect” to pretty much anything human-made. I’ve gone back too many times to old “perfections” and found that what was perfect in my eyes then no longer is, now.
For the moment, two niggling objections bother me. First, the Veil will only accept truth from its victims, but the Doctor saying he ran from Gallifrey the first time because he was “scared” didn’t convince me. Scared of what? Of (as I’ve seen suggested) finding out that he was the hybrid himself (did they even *have* that prophecy back when the Doctor took off the first time?). \Let me put it this way: if *I* were the Veil, I’d want further explanation than that, and I wouldn’t let my victim off until I got it.
The other problem for me is that “cliff-hanger” at the very end: “The hybrid . . . is ME.” That just doesn’t make sense, IMO, regardless of how Hell Bent plays around with possibilities of interpretation afterward, settling at length on Doctor/Clara as the answer. I felt that that HS speech was misleading, distracting, and unnecessary. “Tell them I came the long way ’round” was more than enough for me. It had a lovely flavor of menace to it, and would not have left some fans feeling bait-and-switched because no, the Doctor did not tear a million bad TLs limb from limb and stomp Gallifrey to dust, as the “ME” speech about the prophecy might rightly have led them to expect him to. The issue of “the hybrid” in the prophecy did have to be addressed, once raised; but I didn’t like that way of using it as a tease at the end of HS.
So my objections are structural in nature; given the number of and complexities piled up and demanding to be dealt with in the last two episodes, I have to admire the deftness with which most of them were handled and the major ones resolved.
So yeah — I re-watch too, but sparingly. I don’t want to run the risk of over-saturation. Funny, I’m reminded of how my sister and I used to dash off down to Greenwich Village on the weekends to see Ingmar Bergman’s “The Magician” that was playing in an “art” house down there for months. We ended up practically able to recite the whole thing to each other in Swedish, or our version of Swedish, just for kicks and giggles. Our mother thought we were nuts. She was probably right. I’ve never been able to shake the sensation that Swedish movie actors might just as well just say their lines in English and stop pretending to speak a different language, for heaven’s sake! Well, there are so many very similar (related) words, specially nouns, plus English expressions, and a similar subject-verb-object at the end of the sentence sort of structure. Or so it seems to me (watching the original Wallander series on Netflix, with English subtitles, not that soppy Brannagh remake that’s much more polished and beautiful to look at, but too highly colored and — hot? Emo? — for the original material, IMO).
Oh, that’s the wine talking; and talking, and talking. Fie upon it; off to bed.
3 September 2016 at 09:20 #53840@missy I did some wandering through some of the fan-vids on Youtube by people using pop tunes as musical scores for their clips — there are some very good ones out there, and I expect many more have been made since. A couple of people set their vids of 12/Clara to “King and Lionheart”, by — oh damn, what’s that group called — “Trolls and Tunnels” or something? Good, definitely SFnal song, too. I listen to some of those fan vids now and then. Amazing, how this show throws off so much fan creativity on so many levels — but that’s another topic.
It still gives me a thrill to think of the whole crew putting “Heaven Sent” together at top speed, thinking all along, “This could be a disaster” and then seeing the final result — a small masterpiece in a little corner of media-land, flawed (like everything) but stunning. What well-deserved joy, for them all! I don’t believe in God, but sometimes plain old life is *good*, and we are good, to and with and because of each other.
3 September 2016 at 09:12 #53839Was reading a new post-collapse UK novel called “Chimes”, can’t recall the author’s name, but it’s very well written, with an interesting concept that might be of particular interest to music enthusiasts here. I ran out of time and returned it to the library without finishing it, but I recommend it, should people come across it. Luckily, one of our local branch librarians is an SF fan, married to an SF writer, so we get a *lot* of the newest in the field.
Also “Snow White Must Die”, translated from German by a friend here, and popular in Europe — a contemporary murder mystery set (so far) in a rural town.
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