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23 July 2015 at 04:37 #41371
@janetteb I like that slant on it: the macro foreknowledge is permanent background that the Doctor can reach into in emergencies, but he normally leaves it alone so as to be able to actually carry on a relatively sane life (well, lives) on the level of “current events”. That works. To have a brain big enough to keep everything throughout time and space in sharp focus on the micro level would probably mean having a brain as big as the universe, which is a bit extreme even for the Doctor. Sounds like, from another pov, having mentally scanned the Akashic records (of everything ever) and then walking away with a rough summary version in your head with the fixed points highlighted in red . . .
23 July 2015 at 03:36 #41367I don’t want to spoil anything for anybody so I’ll put this here and not ping anyone. An interview with Capaldi and Coleman from their trip to Berlin right after SDCC has some interesting comments (it’s a good interview in general, IMO) including an answer from Capaldi in which he suggests that we don’t see everything about the Doctor on screen; behind that man is another Doctor a “hidden” Doctor — an aspect of the Doctor that *does* in fact see and know all, including, presumably, the futures of people he cares about (Clara as companion in S9 was the subject) and, I suppose, his own.
What we see, he seems to be saying, is the active presence of the Doctor, which may have a general idea of where events are going but in some way masks or semi-forgets all the knowledge of the “hidden” Doctor. This was linked, in Capaldi’s answer, to “something dark” pursuing the two of them in S9.
For those who haven’t come across it, here’s a link — the interview is on iTunes, but is a free offering:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/doctor-who-meet-the-cast/id1021303210?i=347547658&mt=2
Hope that works.
22 July 2015 at 21:11 #4135820 July 2015 at 00:51 #4129619 July 2015 at 23:52 #41295@phaseshift The proposed thread for Faith, Philosophy, Myth, and Reason sounds promising. You could build it (well, a foundation anyway, using some of those older posts) and see if we will come . . . Or keep the earlier posts as an unofficial FAQ on what people have said about these issues that doesn’t need to be gone over again, unless you want to bring new elements to the table?
@bluesqueakpip & others — Yep, the monk thing’s been done, I forgot. So maybe a lighthouse, although you don’t need a lighthouse for isolation and meditation when you’ve got a TARDIS.
It *was* the Sherlockians who brought the games of story fandom into being, wasn’t it? One of the lawyers in my husband’s firm was an active member of the local Baker Street Irregulars, and loved talking about it. I was tempted to join — but I needed something more SFnal and open ended to play with, not a very limited and closed system of canonical works. So, inevitably perhaps, Doctor Who . . .
19 July 2015 at 23:28 #41294@bluesqueakpip Watson is definitely straight; but Watson is also someone not-scared of loving a man very deeply. He just won’t be sexually attracted to that man.
Yes; like CapDoc and Clara, actually, or at least that seems to me to be one clear way to read them. If that’s the core of the central relationships that Moffat is working on in both of these shows, in both instances there are fans dying to have the two sets of friends turn the connection sexual. It’s like magnetism — the fascination with the figure of undeclared or ambiguous sexuality, who must be clapped together in bed at last with the great good friend so everybody can breathe a sigh of relief. This idea is the root of a lot of fan fiction, particularly Kirk and Spock at the beginning or K/S, as it was originally called. This then became “Slash” fiction for the / between the initials of the friends’ names, which has gone on to be applied to just about every possible pairing in popular screen fiction (Starsky/Hutch, Steed/Peel, Batman/Robin, Harry/Draco, etc.).
The irresistible force (love and/or sex) meets the immovable object, and the immovable object moves, however reluctantly. I suppose at heart it’s plain old Love Conquers All including personal frostiness and same-sex taboos. The writers don’t need to install it in the characters — fans will eagerly supply it spontaneously, more so now in times of more fluid ideas about human sexuality than back in the last century. Apparently, the thrill has not gone despite the increased acceptance of LGBTQ love and sexuality, cuz Slash rolls on into robust porn can now end up — agh, surely this is not a good result — as a best seller called 50 Shades of Bleh and its no doubt endless parade of sequels and imitations.
19 July 2015 at 07:49 #41277@jimthefish thanks for the Sherlock Holmes page — interesting to be reminded that in Conan Doyle’s day homosexuality was a crime. The idea that Sherlock, that rock-ribbed intellectual, would jeopardize his image (and self-image) as a staunch, brilliant, and even heroic upholder of the laws of Queen and country by allowing sexual urges to lead him into criminal behavior himself just makes no sense — not that it’s impossible, but the man who lived that kind of double life at that time would be some other man, not Sherlock as we know him. Bringing the characters into the present, with homosexuality de-criminalized, does free up the hitherto fairly blank territory of Holmes’ sexuality, but even in Steven M’s “Sherlock”, so far only a bit of (possible) innuendo has occurred. Don’t we live in a peculiar time — people yakking passionately away all over the net etc. about the supposed or explicit “sexuality” of entirely fictional persons . . . ? IMO it’s play, but a strange sort of game.
Bluesqueakpip Good piece on DW time travel. Thanks for the link.
@whohar Good luck to anyone here set to try sending in a script! Writers outside the UK seem to be excluded, which does make sense since DW is such a UK show — and I’m delighted to see it stay that way. I wouldn’t be tempted in any case — writing screenplays for TV requires a specialized skill set that I don’t have. Which suits me fine, actually; when I take in fiction for pleasure, I don’t try to write whatever form I’m enjoying, because I want it to *remain* a pleasure for me, not part of my working life. I’ve heard other colleagues say the same.
18 July 2015 at 21:05 #41272Just something — I like it because it upholds the idea that I am not the only idiot who can not understand time travel in DW (or anyplace else, but that’s another story):
Huh. That looks kinda bare. I’ve got the page bookmarked so let me know if the link doesn’t work, and I’ll go get a way in through Google. Right now, *must* sleep.
18 July 2015 at 06:22 #41263All — went to see a new film, “Mr. Holmes”, tonight; Ian MacKellen, Laura Linney, that kid with the strange pixie face with a flat pug nose in the middle of it. A dismissive review in the latest New Yorker Magazine had piqued my interest, so — I dunno whether to say more or not, at this point, cuz spoilers — ? This much you can get from synopses and reviews, though — story picks up an aged Holmes living as a recluse except for a housekeeper and her young son. Events evoke memories of an old case, and the game is a-hobble, except for in flash-backs. Questions of memory, responsibility — well, do I need to say more? It’s a bit like a Doctor Who story-arc fused into one long ep, 2 hours’ worth.
I think some people here would enjoy it.
18 July 2015 at 00:51 #41262@craig Wow, that timeline page is great — the one for LOTR is *beautiful*! I think I saw “Primer” at my local teensy weird film house, and those are *exactly* the kinds of stories that blank my mind so completely that I steer away from time travel stories in general — I *always* miss a lot no matter how many times I watch. Exceptions, simple stuff like Benford’s “Timescape”, or the famous Bradbury story, just lost the title from head. And Doctor Who, though it’s sometimes not simple at all, but the strokes are bold enough for me to catch and enjoy.
@denvaldron As for that little vampire film, the Regal Ent. Group thingie-plex theater uptown here showed that one for a week, so I got a chance to see it — sweet and funny, loved it. Also Dark City, which I think is a gorgeous classic piece. Wasn’t it a comic book first (sorry, graphic novel)? I think I heard that somewhere, and the movie as I recall it does in fact somehow maintain a very strong comic book feel, somehow, but in a wonderful way, not an “oh, it’s just a comic” way. My dad was an animator, and I collected comics as a kid; I’ve always felt that there were incredible things that could be done with comics (and so it has come to pass — “Maus”, that one about occupied Palestine, others), if we could just get past having to cram the frames full – economics, I think (price vs. pages vs. clean, simple and clear images, or cluttered up ones? Too simple, but something like that).
18 July 2015 at 00:36 #41261@purofilion Wait, what? You mean we’re NOT all mad? And, yes, along those lines — we could have an episode or more of people desperately trying to figure out why the Doctor has retreated into a Silent order of Gramdillion monks, spends all his days there in prayer or weeding the rocksour beds and pinchfoot vines, and won’t come out . . . that is, what religion he’s joined and why, or if not, what *else* the hell he thinks he’s doing? An exercise in reading backward from changed behavior to previous experience.
@jimthefish So to whom do we owe the gratitude for *not*-Sherrinford Hope? Good grief!
@bluesqueakpip You mean Mycroft went out and *found* “Mycroft” and took it home and adopted it? I could see Sherlock coming up with “Sherlock” in a fit of absent-mindedness while doped up, but Mycroft?
@xtremez I think the Doctor does indeed have a basic belief, which is that everything has a “rational” explanation, if you just keep digging for it. But since the show is (IMO) Science Fantasy, fantasy elements (which sometimes appear supernatural) are often dealt with, not by accepting that fantasy is “real” but by slapping complicated (or simple) hand-wavy but scientific sounding “explanations” on them. He does tend to stop by here and there to unmask a “God” as a parasitical alien or some other type of con-artist, rather than becoming a follower of any of them.
But it’s Doctor Who we’re talking about, so IMO of course anything *could* happen — but it won’t be acceptable without a solid explanation that viewers find convincing enough to accept for the purposes of a good adventure.
16 July 2015 at 10:26 #41235@purofilion Nobody ever needs adventures with the nob of a tooth. *Nobody*. So sorry! Better days ahead . . . !
16 July 2015 at 10:24 #41234@purofilion Oh, absolutely — the Doctor is about the least “worshipful” character on TV, at least so far (well, he damn near worshiped Clara in S8, but he did it with a lot of banter-y insults that most people don’t associate with the idea of “worship”, and besides, he really needed her to help remind him of what kind of guy he was.
Wait a minute — “his goo” — what?! Who?? Urg . . .
15 July 2015 at 18:11 #41215@purofilion Oh, I’m reaching back to a 30-year-old memory, and the story was set far in the future, so I just used shorthand here. Thinking back, I recall that the human visitor spent half a lifetime there, encouraging the documented development of whatever formal sort of governmental bodies that that time required for recognition by the Federation (or whatever) as a member world whose peoples have sovereignty over their world. It might have been called something like “Beach Front Property” . . .
15 July 2015 at 07:09 #41209Neat stuff, in case others here haven’t seen it yet, first two items on this DW news site today:
It’s hardly surprising, but is *very* nice to know, that S10 has already been green-lit for funding. Yippeeeeeeeee!
@bonkers2015 Good question — maybe it can lie to non-Daleks, but not to its mates? Have any of them lied to the Doctor?
15 July 2015 at 07:04 #41208@denvaldron Oh, yes, there are real-life examples of the outsider succeeding in a new cultural environment. How often in reality is the outsider-success a success specifically in the skills (previously unknown to him) of the culture he has joined? If he succeeds *by virtue of* his position of marginality in his new culture (or, upon return “home”, his old culture (cultural marginalization being a situation I’m familiar with from having been in it, after returning from teaching school in West Africa 1961-62), that makes sense. From an “outsider” position, it is possible to see elements of the culture you’re inhabiting very differently than the native inhabitants do, and to derive from that “foreignness” of viewpoint ideas and insights of use to the culture you have entered. That is in fact what Conrad did with “Heart of Darkness” — he drew on experiences of his own in West Africa to write about what kinds of impacts white colonialism was having, telling Europeans things they really did not wish to know — but needed to know — after he’d come home. He didn’t invent a new and better way of cooking pounded yam and “teach” the natives how to cook their own food better. Mind you, European doctors *did*, while I was in Nigeria, introduce the idea of *not* stuffing cooked pounded yam down your infant’s throat with your thumb, which I saw Nigerian mothers do while I was there, and that probably was helpful.
The whole cross-cultural phenomenon is incredibly complicated; I went into that situation, as a white girl in her early twenties, having been told beforehand (during our training) that in the experience of USAID and other NGO’s, even as little as two years’ exposure as a person specifically charged with being helpful in our foreign surroundings would leave us permanently marginalized not just in Nigerian cultures, but in our own when we got home. I certainly found that to be true for myself; I know at least one other who came home and snapped back into an even more rigidly Right wing set of US attitudes than she’d come to Africa with, but that’s an effect, too — a rejection of marginalization.
But to return to the topic — White kids kidnapped and raised by Indians were often rescued and sent into Christian schools where they were forcibly re-Europeanized; a number of them escaped and tried to return to their Indian homes, finding White Christian culture constraining, dishonest, and cruel, compared to Indian societies more open and relaxed about the raising of children. Indian kids kidnapped and raised in White homes have left few records, but what I’ve seen suggests inability to “fit in” and general misery, often resulting in a fall-back to alcoholism. None of either type became, so far as I know, distinguished contributors to either their birth cultures or their kidnap cultures. Actually, the best film I know giving realistic take on the White kid adopted by Indians is “Little Big Man”; highly recommended.
So I’m not slamming the whole sub-genres of “adoption” or adventure stories across cultures, just pointing out that to POC friends of mine in the SF community, there are objections based on a lot of what I think could be called “colonialist” SF — that valorizes the White guy as superior to the “natives”, no matter how much he loves them. There’s also a wonderful story by — Chad Oliver, I think (he was a professional anthropologist) in which a human explorer crashes on a paradise planet and lives among its people (no other humans arriving in the time frame of the story) until he dies a respected citizen among citizens. He has earned that respect, not by being a better farmer or hunter or fisherman etc. than the native farmers, hunters, etc. are, but by leaving the native people with a carefully drawn up document claiming full title to and control over their own planet against all outsider claims, on the basis of which the native people (when men do come, looking for resources) the locals apply to the Council of Worlds (or whatever) as a perfectly normal planet with its own civilization and rights to self determination, and win that status. I offer this as an alternative to the usual Mighty Whitey tropes you mention, and a way of telling that story that makes it *not* worthless. IOW, I’m agreeing with you. Cases vary. But Mighty Whitey still predominates, economically, in our modern world.
I didn’t say Burroughs was stupid and trite, did I? I didn’t intend to sum those books up only in terms of their currently questionable assumptions, particularly since I didn’t read most of them. I did love the Tarzan books, though I never got into the Mars books. I loved A. Merritt, too, who held the racial attitudes prevalent in his time, and Lovecraft, and John Buchan. Those were wonderfully entertaining books; they still are, but modern readers are going to stumble over outworn attitudes expressed in them. Leigh Brackett, I think, wrote some good Mighty Whitey space adventures, too. And as I recall, the most of what was written in that vein for adult readers was about just the sort of romance you speak of, which is a version of the European romance of unlikes, that fascinating gap of “unequal” individuals who find themselves drawn together by their higher qualities and personal attraction (Jane and Mr. Rochester? “Twilight”? Come to think of it, the Doctor and Clara — ?).
What’s new is that having managed to attract POC into SF as writers and fans, us old Whiteys are finding it both shocking and very useful to listen to what *they* have to say about the Golden Age of SF and its development into the modern. This doesn’t invalidate the virtues of older stories with attitudes we’re still struggling to shed as a culture, but it does the useful job of pointing out where those stories date themselves by outdated and harmful assumptions about race, about gender, about culture and religion, etc.
What Nnedi Okorafor or Owl Going Back would say about “Princess of Mars” I don’t know, but if they had read it, I suspect (based on related comments from them and their cohort of POC in SF) they’d have very different impressions of it than you or I would (I haven’t read it myself, but what you say about it does interest me in doing so). Like so many people on so many levels, I’ve been a “marginal man” in many ways for many years, seeing most things from more than the default settings of he culture I grew up in. Saying that I can see negative patterns in a work doesn’t equate with not being able to see, and value, its positive ones — in a balance that changes as my awareness grows (well, I hope it does, until age starts to shrink it).
15 July 2015 at 04:48 #41204@denvaldron Yes, “Lord of Light” is wonderful, and was a huge hit at the time. I don’t think I ever read Piserchia, or that particular book of hers, anyway — good reminder, thanks. We have a good SF used bookstore in town, and I should be able to lay hands on a copy. To tell the truth, I never read much Burroughs except a couple of Tarzan books (to compare them to a series called, ah, “Bomba the Jungle Boy”. Bombe doesn’t appear to have held up all that well, but at the time . . . The thing about “White man on exotic planet” that draws the most objections that I’ve seen is that weird thing where the white stranger comes among the tribes, whatever they are, and within a week he’s better at, say, Indian skills (hunting Xs, shooting arrows, etc.) than all the Indians are, who grew up learning the skills of their culture. I don’t know how Burroughs’ Mars books stack up in that respect.
14 July 2015 at 01:16 #41178@Linds738 Listen is about how the Doctor, left traveling on his own too long, gets lost in that piano-sized brain of his and can end up freaking himself out, so it’s not surprising if the episode itself freaks us out too. No shame, no blame! It’s a handsomely built episode — I like the way he starts out with harking back to a fear shared by many children (I sure had it — could not sleep if any of my hands or feet were hanging out over the edge or end of the bed because of fear they’d be grabbed by a monster), is encouraged (literally!) by an experience of his own as a child of getting good advice from a future friend, and then passes that advice on to young Rupert Pink in the orphanage like a grown-up “Dad” doing his dad-ly duty with his dad-skills.
So pretty; sometimes there are elements of a DW story that you can follow the way your eyes follow a flat stone skipped across the surface of a pond.
I wouldn’t conclude, by the way, that hating Clara is a popular opinion: the minority (IMO, from what I’ve seen and read) who do the public Clara-hate shout very loudly, but I don’t think they’re representative of much (except the king of persistent yelling that typifies the kind of bullies who hide behind nasty words and anonymity — even “mean girls” have more guts, to slam their victim to her face). Sometimes I wonder whether part of this weird electronic ganging up on someone isn’t, in this case, in part a result of the fact that sniping at Peter Capaldi (for being “top old”, “too cold”, whatever) ran into a stone wall of people answering “He is an experienced actor with strong skills and a huge love of and knowledge of Doctor Who and he’s doing a great job, so quit whining — you sound like a fourteen-year-old fangirl/boy with a huge crush on Tennant or Smith, so try re-watching S8 to catch on to what you missed the first time.” More or less.
I think some of these people, finding less and less positive return for their investment of venom, deflected it onto Clara, about whom opinion is more divided. And I don’t think change in itself is the issue: in this case, it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The people who still whinge on about her seem to be those who thought she was okay-to-just-barely-tolerable when she was what Steven M. himself has admitted was little more than a pawn being used as a plot-mover, but as soon as the writers of S8 gave her material she could use to grow a self, with goals and needs of her own, a lot of people became quite bitter about it: How dare Clara grow a life and a character strong enough to hold her own in a series written as a two-hander (two leads playing off each other as near-equals), because now that we can actually see and hear Clara herself, *it’s become the Clara Who show”.
There are reasons to dislike Clara, if you hate assertive women (or, negative versions, Drama Queens or Control Freaks), but complaining that she “obliterated the Doctor” is just idiotic: nobody obliterates an actor of Capaldi’s calibre just by becoming a better character for his character to play with/off of. Frankly, I think there’s a strong stink of plain old misogyny + very green eyed jealousy, coming off much of the Clara-hate. It’s pretty much B.S., IMO, and I give it no credit and as little of my attention as I can manage. Life is too short.
14 July 2015 at 00:37 #41176@blenkinsopthebrave Thanks for that link — I think I did miss part of this adaptation when it was first broadcast here — more great UK tv to watch! Such a burden . . . : )
9 July 2015 at 22:41 #410897 July 2015 at 06:49 #41034@theviking Sorry that link isn’t working for Deep Breath; I don’t know whether you might find that episode on Youtube or not, but it might be worth a look. Good luck!
@crieshavoc That could work as a pattern for the development of a young hotshot brain into some one breaking free from rigid expectations that understanding your enemy is permission to completely obliterate him to the next step — moving into his headspace sufficiently to refuse to destroy him, and to try to fix it so he’s not your enemy any more, or at any rate threatening to you.
@whisht Yeah, like that. Good bonkers!
@phaseshift That works too — that the Doctor and the Master might once have shared an ambition to do good in the universe by using their Time Lord strengths, and then come to grief and separation over some attempt to do this that went horribly wrong, with blame shared between them. Which reminds me — was the Master also kicked out, or did he leave on his own?
@purofilion As to the Master’s family’s “lands” setting him higher than the Doctor, socially and economically, the scene in the barn in Listen certainly suggests modest beginnings for the Doctor, for whatever reason — born poor, or lost his parents and living in a boarding school, etc. — and the Doctor’s arrogance is always grounded (according to him) in his superior intelligence, rather than in wealth or high birth — which makes it a kind of *defensive* arrogance, since we know he didn’t do well at school, didn’t know how to fly the Tardis for a while, and so on. On the other hand, he knows an awful lot — but presumably it’s from bombing around the universe for 1000-2000 years, not from his early schooling where he almost flunked out.
And I’m not so sure that he has never behaved in a cowardly fashion in his life. Sometimes a person learns that as a bedrock value from having failed to be brave and having seen what happened to others as a result; so then that becomes one of his rules — never be cowardly (again). You could see grabbing a Tardis and running away as cowardly, if it was earned punishment that he wanted to avoid.
6 July 2015 at 17:44 #40997@purofilion Well, Scorpy *always* wears black leather, does’t he? Which is kinda weird for a guy whose biggest biological challenge is that his weird head-stuff overheats, as I recall.
I haven’t seen Farscape in forever, but from what I recall, once the main focus becomes Scorpy trying to get info from Crichton, I got a distinct Master/Doctor vibe from the show, particularly the Master in his Simm phase — a homoerotic undertone that sometimes develops around stories about hero/villain pairs when they’re very closely involved in struggling over whatever the bone of contention is. It’s that vibe that writers of fanfic either pick up (or find a way to justify) in such stories, and then go off and write Slash fiction about.
The pattern is usually that the villain becomes obsessed with not just beating the hero at whatever the game is, but obsessed with the hero himself. Vice versa, not so much, if at all; that way the “taint” of homoeroticism (as far too many people still see it) stays with the bad guy. A stellar example was once much discussed: the modern re-make of Ben Hur, in which Stephen Boyd said later that he’d deliberately played the bad guy as secretly in love with the Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston, as I recall) and just as deliberately never told Heston he was doing it (and Heston, being Heston, never got it). Very effective it was, too — the result was an obsessively intimate undercurrent in a huge, splashy comic book of an historical story. I thought I saw that kind of through-line with Scorpy and Crichton, edged with the sadism of someone who’s been made into a pain-freak by his own past (there’s an episode about Scorpy’s upbringing among the Skarrans, as I recall, that feeds into this concept).
I could be mis-remembering, or just wrong, of course; I’m curious to know whether this makes any sense to you?
6 July 2015 at 07:49 #40983@purofilion Um, don’t want to do spoilers, but the, ah, black leather and — want to go over to Spoilers?
6 July 2015 at 07:15 #40979@purofilion We had no kids in the house at that time, so I never noticed the ratings for Farscape. I’d have judged it as fine and dandy until The Chair, not just because it was extended sadism, but because as I recall there was a fairly clear erotic charge to those scenes as well — which would probably fly right over the heads of kid-viewers, but, urk . . . Not my kind of thing, and maybe that’s all there is to it.
6 July 2015 at 02:20 #40977@Wisht Ah, the great Vincent Price . . . How well I remember cowering in my seat with my eyes covered while that same sister jeered at me for not understanding that it was ALL MAKE-UP — we were seeing “House of Wax”, which would have scarred me for life had I been so foolish as to believe her and continue watching. And to think that, decades later, he had a conversation with my sister in an L.A. supermarket about how to choose good grapefruit . . . His son Barrett lives in my city, and is a teacher, author, passionate environmentalist, and one of the most cheerful and delightful people you could ever hope to meet.
5 July 2015 at 02:24 #40954@phaseshift What??!!! Shooting gamma rays — ! Bizarre and strange barely begin to describe it . . . is there a type of bedrock that doesn’t irradiate us? I have read that building bricks are supposed to be significant emitors, but I’ve gotten the sense that pretty much everything is, one way or another, which means that beings living closer to the more concentrated groups of stars and planets can be expected to be “armored” in form, more or less like Earth’s beetles, to withstand the constant heavy bombardment of radiation. Out here in the galactic boonies, not so much . . .?
5 July 2015 at 02:16 #40953@phaseshift re “The Magical Negro”, a trope that does hark back, IMO, to “The Noble Savage” (see Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s sidekick, as a sort–of transitional figure between these two categories: a “savage” who is noble enough to pretty much ignore his own people and their ongoing oppression and go off to help a White hero out of scrapes with gunslingers and cattle rustlers and the like). If you look down the page linked below, there are some lists of literary MN’s, with several Steve King titles included. I don’t agree with all of the selections shown, but I’ve heard some pretty convincing presentations by young POC at SF conventions on this subject. It’s the inclusion in “magical” of the idea of plain old wisdom/insight in a Black character (who is only there to give a White protagonist the benefit of that wisdom/insight) that’s perhaps a reach too far. I was thinking of the movie of The Shining, myself, rather than the book — which I think I’d better go back and read again; it’s been too long . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Magical_Negro_occurrences_in_fiction
I’m hoping that Sembene (pretty enigmatic so far) proves complex enough not to be seen this way, but it’s difficult when a POC character is in a story without any ethnic context — others of his (or her) ethnicity with whom there are significant ties and interactions. Sembene is set up as a character who is attached to Sir Malcolm and has no purpose other than (judging by what Sembene has said so far) being some sort of watchman and support to Sir Malcolm, and bringing — not yet, but I expect it — some concept of African-based supernatural power to the party, as it were. On the other hand, an African in that Victorian London setting + wildly gothic events is traditionally quite at home in exactly that character outline, so . . . Well, I love the character just as he is, but I know lots of people whose opinions I don’t feel qualified to dismiss who (probably) won’t.
The whole tangle of arguments over color tokenism, cultural appropriation, ethnic stereotyping, etc. is alive and kicking in the SF/F world, now that numbers of non-White writers have staked their claims in what at one time was *almost* 100% White Guy territory (SF, in particular). All to the good, since when women made that move in the sixties and seventies, it was a real shot in the arm to the genre. So’s this change, but (as usual) not without lots of friction, disagreement, and charges of “over-reaction” flying about.
5 July 2015 at 01:43 #40952@phaseshift — Farscape: yep, that was me, on the torture issue. It’s very much a personal limit thing, of course, since an awful lot of stories, great and small, are *about* the protagonist being wrung out and driven by terrible events up to and including actual torture, and where you start feeling heavily manipulated by extended scenes of characters being deliberately subjected to intense pain by someone demanding something from them varies from person to person. And you’re right, the Scorpius stories were where this pattern really took off; at some point I really *did* stop watching because of it, then came back and found that Farscape had been cancelled, which I was sorry to hear. It never bothered me in “Buffie”, so I guess that’s where my tolerance level was comfortable. Strokes and folks, as always . . .
@jimthefish We need a way to set up a group rampage, don’t you think? We’re still only halfway through 2015, and whole beautiful continents of wonderful entertainment are falling away around us . . .
2 July 2015 at 07:18 #40918Well, hot diggity dog — I am the Doctor! I’m not really 2,000 yrs old, though, even if I sometimes *feel* that way. But “many mistakes”? Um. Yas . . . might as well cop to it. Still chuffed, though.
Best of all, the long wait is nearly over — Anybody know how the schedule works? Will they be done with all the actual shooting — and probably most of post-production, at least for the earlier episodes — by the time Capaldi & co show up at ComiCon in San Diego, the weekend after this one?
30 June 2015 at 23:58 #40894@bluesqueakpip Ha, well, good; my disposition isn’t that cheerful these days, and I don’t recommend it to anyone else.
As for the calculations — damn it, *this* is why I generally stay far, far away from time travel (in my own work, anyway, and often in the SF of others): I just can’t keep all these fixed points + all the moving ones in my perspective at the same time. The 50th is still in everybody’s future, then? Sheesh. Give me a break . . .
But I like the rest of your argument very much; you win, and thanks for a sensible explanation of this determined homeward course of his that also makes sense emotionally.
30 June 2015 at 20:23 #40888@theviking Here <http://www.dailymotion.com/us>; this seems to be working.
30 June 2015 at 20:20 #40886The thing is, as Time of the Doctor made abundantly clear, the Time Lords as we knew them in the classic series aren’t coming back. Ever. It is not possible as their return would start a new Time War.
So CapDoc isn’t guilty of destroying his own planet and people any more — having found a way to *not* use The Moment instead of using it — but in doing so he’s instead mislaid them in a gigantic way. And whatever barrier kept them safe (and frozen) in their pocket universe, with nothing to do but “have hope”, is now permeable to some extent (the TL’s did grant a new regen cycle to the Doctor, at Clara’s behest, so that’s a two-way exchange between ourspace and the pocket place.
Wasn’t the pocket universe designed to contain them in an inactive state, while at the same time deflecting incursions against them by the Daleks et al? What enabled the supposedly isolated TLs on Gallifrey to interact with Clara and the Doctor in ourspace? What do the TLs need the Doctor alive for anyway, if they can be forcefully active in our universe from where he put them?
More than that, what does he need *them* for? “I just wanna go home”? It’s not as if he has a loving family, a little kingdom, and a faithful dog waiting for him there. I’ve just never found the whole Gallifrey connection that convincing, I guess, so CapDoc being unable to figure out what corner he tossed G. into and wanting desperately to find it again doesn’t really work for me as a compelling motive. I don’t see a good reason, in terms of fictional structure, to mess with Gallifrey at all any more — or at least not for a really long time. So I sort of *hope* they can’t return. I think I like the Doctor better as Ishi, the Last of his Tribe, than as Odysseus, homebound Lord of Ithaca.
30 June 2015 at 08:04 #40875Hmm. Just came across a series called “Chandler & Co”, two ladies who got into the private eye business with “Larry Blakeson” (PC) as a sort of mentor, circa 1994 I think — the ladies are grand, the stories are mostly about the perfidiousness of men. Capaldi is only in the first series of six stories (by the time the series got renewed by BBC, the leads had gone and signed onto other jobs), but he does a dandy job while he’s there. Not surprisingly, the series folded after the second series — BBC incompetence. But the stories are good — nobody gets killed but people do have to deal with the consequences of their actions.
30 June 2015 at 07:57 #40874@purofilion Oh, the idiotic coffee drinks — I keep thinking of the flour-and-water sculpted hair-dos in the court of Louis XIV, galleons and coaches and any mad, extravagant thing, rippling with weevils come for the flour paste of course. These crazy “coffee” drinks are pure decadence, nothing but hot egg-creams as far as I can tell, even if you do sprinkle in some powdered pumpkin. Such B.S.! And people so eager to lap it up at $5 a drink, because there’s *sugar* in it! Maybe sugary drinks will prove to be our equivalent of the lead pipes that fed drinking water to the ancient Romans and garbled their brains . . .
29 June 2015 at 18:14 #40869@purofilion @kharis Re the Moffat-haters: I generally get a huge whiff of pure, plain jealousy in those posts. The sub-text seems to be, “Moffat is so talented and I’m not, so he gets to have all the ‘fun’ *I* could have if *I* could be writing DW, only I have no talent and could never do a quarter of the job of Moffat and his team so I HATE HIM.” Yeah, they do. Or, they’re part of the STFU Mean Girls crew, who mostly didn’t watch S8, mis-remember everything they saw and hear (via confirmation bias) if they did, and just want their “boyfriend” back — Tennant or Smith, so they gang up on Moffat to see who can say the most horrible things about him. So far, it’s a rare few of the haters that have attacked Capaldi. But it’s a nasty kind of circus once it gets going, and people who really do love the show and can see the virtues that make it so appealing and entertaining have to decide just how much they want to engage in a High-School level of simplistic thinking and crazy emotionalism.
Particularly when there’s the option of coming over here for some civilized discussion that’s not reeking of pathetic showing off (look how much smarter I am than Moffat!) and mob-mentality.
The Boy who hasn’t yet warmed to Capaldi has plenty of company, and I wouldn’t resort to The Comfy Chair yet — Moffat says S9 is more cheery, confident, and funnier, and I choose to believe that he’s not lying, so things should be more upbeat and adventurous in S9. S8 was, IMO, the Grand Experiment of watching a new Doctor make himself before our eyes from the ground up, but that’s done and dusted, I think, as of DiH, and then Last Xmas.
27 June 2015 at 08:33 #40858@purofilion — Yup, but it’s *better* than legislation, which would never get past Congress as presently constituted (it’s full of moronic Republican hacks and infantile fools). This is a Supreme Court decision, binding on all the states. It was reached via a 5-4 decision, with the swing vote being, as always in these narrow liberal victories, Justice Kennedy — which has Reactionary idiots so gobsmacked that they’re saying that Kennedy was secretly *blackmailed* into it. In fact, Kennedy’s judicial comment, which is the summary of the decision and the order that it be enforced immediately, is so forthright, decent, and even poetic that a number of same-sex couples are incorporating it into their marriage ceremonies.
So there is no more “marriage” vs. “same-sex marriage” or “gay marriage” in the US any more: just “marriage”. Worth a toast or six, I’d say!
27 June 2015 at 03:36 #40856@purofilion — Um. RPG = Role Playing Games. GOH = Guest of Honor. And thanks for filling me in re info on this Darville person. Whew. Lot of this odd appropriation of ethnic identity seems to be going around — have you seen any stories about a young woman here who pretended to be of African descent and got herself into the higher ranks of the current incarnation of the Civil Rights movement here? Her parents turn out to be White fundies, who outed her because a reporter found them and asked them about the lies she had concocted about herself (“I self-identify as Black”, but no Black ancestry as claimed), quickly eclipsed by the Charleston Massacre and now the double victory of the Left of center via the Supreme Court.
We have lots of costuming and cosplay in general at our cons too, but for some years we also had panels running on “Fat is a Feminist Issue” because there were (and are) so many heavy women, in particular, in fandom, and they were fighting back about being “fat-shamed”, and encouraging each other to resist it. Less of that now — some medical input on the health costs of obesity that they’d been denying put a bit of a damper on this, but it’s still a huge issue and not just here — see the efforts in Paris to put the kibosh in using models as thin as paper clips at fashion events, etc.
27 June 2015 at 01:39 #40854@arbutus — Definitely, to the teams!
@purofilion — Well, maybe Harlan’s objection to Platt goes back much further than I thought . . . We’re more civilized now (sorta).
Actually, most of my year is pretty quiet — and writing (or not writing, and doing a whole ton of other home-centered stuff connected with living solo now) is lonely sometimes. Most pros go to conventions when they can, to get to talk in person to friends and colleagues they rarely see otherwise, have some lively give and take on ideas with audience participation, get some feedback from fans (and sign books), and hang out at the bar with old friends. My traveling season settled some time ago into dead winter, busy spring, maybe a WorldCon if it’s someplace interesting (the other side of working on your own so mud is not having a high tolerance for vast mobs of people seething around among maybe four or five hotels and a convention center, so there has to be more than that to sweeten the pot — and we don’t get paid to show up, although the GOH’s will be comped pretty much everything, as it should be). Then one or two biggies in the fall — World Fantasy, mainly.
Keeping in mind that prices for everything (including con attending memberships) were much lower in the late seventies, yep, I was sometimes able to get a guest membership or a one-day pass for a friend or relative. My husband attended some cons with me in the early days, but being a lawyer doesn’t bring with it the kind of time-flexibility that being a writer does. I invited my sister-in-law once, but she was horrified by seeing so many obese people (reading, RPG’s, and other sitting-still activities, and often disabilities as well, are part of the problem) in one place; turned out she’d gone through a balloon phase herself, and couldn’t stand being reminded (was skinny when I knew her). IQ’s, expertise, and energy are high at these events; body awareness and comfort with, not so much, but then fandom prides itself on being non-judgmental about such things. Fine by me, til you get into an elevator with some of the guys who never wash . . .
Your panels sound great — I hope you get to attend sometimes? I don’t know the Demidenko issue — Google will help!
27 June 2015 at 01:21 #40852@purofilion — okay, over to the Hoof.
26 June 2015 at 18:03 #40849@purofilion — Oh, they meant that Moffat “looks tired”, along the lines of the Moffat-haters who keep telling each other that he’s been writing the show too long and has gone “stale”, isn’t as good as RTD was (or was better, but is a better writer than he is a show-runner), or is irredeemably sexist, so he needs to move on. Most that I’ve seen online say they love Capaldi but want another writer for him, even most of the ones who started out with “I just can’t warm to him” etc. This mob, at the panel, had already spent their anger when I got there, and were just sharing a pathetic sort of discouragement. I think I cheered them up a bit, and encouraged them to at least give S9 (*and* S8, for those who’d given up) a chance before hanging themselves.
Smith was what they were missing, I think — not his stories, of course (since Moffat wrote most of them), but his giddy goofiness. I didn’t take that on, since I didn’t care for the flirty stuff and, frankly, *did* find the plot-pawn utilization of Clara (or so it seemed to me) sexist at worst, clumsily and blurrily confusing at best, so I was then pretty much where they are now.
We’ve got some general fighting going on around the Hugo Awards right now — a couple of heavy-handed, reactionary Christian writers (of no great talent besides) have tried to sabotage the Awards system this year for ignoring their crappy fiction all these years, and have lately mounted a campaign to get a good, experienced editor at Tor Books fired for dissing them. Uproar; not my kind of thing any more. There have been actual fights in the past — Harlan Ellison once walked into a hotel lobby and socked Charles Platt in the puss. It was decades ago, and I doubt that anybody (except Harlan and Platt) even remember what it was about. Mostly, people just have a great time. The tone is usually upbeat, since we all are there to cheer each other up in bad economic times (especially for writers) and enjoy our overlapping fandoms.
26 June 2015 at 07:07 #40847Rats. That ran on a bit; sorry for rambling so long!
26 June 2015 at 07:06 #40846@purofilion — that would be Wiscon, yes; an interesting time was had by all, I’m sure — the convention is 39 yrs old, and last summer there was a super-bust up centering on sexual harassment complaints against a well-known editor (which should have been dealt with much sooner) and an uproar over dueling poets and racism. Result: all my old pals who’ve been running the show for decades made appropriate defenses and apologies and then stepped aside to be replaced by much younger women brimming with passion and energy and, probably, mistakes waiting to be made, and let’s see what happens next year! I will be on hand. It was grand, and honest, and exactly not the way this kind of thing is usually done . . . heads did not roll, and I doubt that grudges were founded. I was damned proud of us.
Now, an SF con in the States is a 2-5 day program of readings, speeches, discussions among what we call a panel of participants on a subject thrown open, after a while to the audience at large for questions and comments, yakking in restaurants and shops and (of course) the hotel bar, an exhibition of fan/pro art on SF themes, fun and games, hospitality suite, etc.
Here’s what I did there: at an opening party on the Friday afternoon, I gave tarot readings for three hours, which surprised me — usually I’m only good for about two, but I as smokin’ and had a long line of aspiring querants, because, they tell me, I am good at this. I went to the Helsinki WorldCon bid party (I hope the Helsinki Con committee wins, went once, want to go back).
Marked these panels in my program (though I didn’t get to all of them — it’s impossible):
“Overlapping Magisteria: Where Science, Religiion, and SF meet.” “Death to Love Triangles”. “Living in a Post-Growth Future”. “Scientific Utopianism in the work of Kim Stanley Robinson” (he was one of the guests of honor). “Kids Speak” about what they like in YA fiction. “Where are the Asexual Voices?” “Utopias, Cyborgs, and Dialects in Feminist SF”. “Fandom, Creators, and the Space between” (fan fiction). “What Makes a Character Come Alive?” “Can BDSM in Speculative Fiction be Feminist?” “Beyond Hogwarts: Magical Education in Fantasy Stories”. And lots more.
I was on a Panel called “Free-Range Parenting is a Social Justice Issue” as a product of a time when most working moms, like mine, necessarily raised their kids “free-range”, vs. stories of modern moms thrown into The System because a neighbor called Child Services on them because a nine-year-old daughter was allowed to go home on the subway on her own. I didn’t say much; I was busy listening.
I was not on a panel called “Don’t You Think he Looks Tired: Strategies for de-Moffatting Doctor Who”. I looked in just after they started and discovered that a) this was not the “STFU Moffat” gang over on tumblr, as I had expected, but glum adults, mostly women but not all, gloomily and resentfully commiserating over Moffat’s “sexism” (female companions circling a central male figure like subordinate planets around the Sun etc.), lousy writing (those long and longer plot and character arcs and other disappointing whatnots), and I’ve forgotten what else. When I realized that most of them hadn’t watched S8 because Deep Breath had seemed too downbeat (or, worse, just because fellow fans had warned them that the new Doctor was mean and gloomy etc.), I had to speak up. Nicely. I was sorry for them. None of them had bothered to go look up interviews with Moffat about S8 vs. S9. Afterward, the guy who had suggested the panel topic to the ConCom thanked me for having said the first thing he’d heard that had given him “hope”. What I’d said was, Moffat says now that Capaldi’s Doc is settled in and post regeneration fugue, he’s really hit his stride and scripts will be more about adventure and funnier.
Another panel that I was not on but joined at the panelists’ invitation was “Old heroes — are they Really Possible?” I used Capaldi’s Doctor as an example of audience reaction to an older actor taking on a leading part that had been held for years by young men. More thanks, after. There’s a lot to be said for being a little bit of a Grand Old Dame in your field (still with lots of good company, too — my generation has only recently begun to die off).
I think at this point all the genres have various regional conventions yearly — Western Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, Horror Writers, Mystery Writers, etc. Most are designed by pros for pros. SF Cons, on the other hand, have a long tradition of being organized, run, and paid for by the fans, who invite pros to come and participate in the program. Works great.
26 June 2015 at 05:03 #40843@arbutus — Wonderful! Love it. Thank you. Shoosh. I gotta get back to music again, been
too lazy and preoccupied.
ichi
26 June 2015 at 01:16 #40839@purofilion — Yep, you got me right, and Kharis spotted me fair and square! Bookish parents, public library branch close by, crazily curious and seeking mind, encouraging teachers in good public schools — and SF was right there on the magazine racks at the “corner store” (malt shop, drug store?), so it was kind of unavoidable.
And I agree with both of you that sometimes, violence and sex can be the bests means to spotlight certain intense subjects and experiences; speaking of which, there’s an interesting analysis of the TV series “Hannibal” in this weeks New Yorker Magazine.
@kharis — I don’t try to write for DW, since I’m really not a *visual* enough writer for visualized drama. I did get a play staged back in the ’90’s, but it hasn’t been in production more than a few times since — too “wordy”, I expect. I’m at home with words much more than with images, or movement in real space. Sure, a script is words, but because of time constraints in a visual medium, the words must be minimal but tightly controlled. They usually don’t mean much and have hardly any effect until actors speak them and embody their meanings for us to see. Even crazily uneven and unfocused DW scripts have their brilliant bits, but the brilliance is collaborative — not entirely different from how effective fiction writing works, but hugely different all the same.
Okay, I feel a lecture coming on, and I’m not going to do it . . .
Meantime, I’m glad you’ve found your real town — that, I think, is a major part of what we all do for each other here. Welcome!
26 June 2015 at 00:26 #40838Macnee — I think I saw him in Marat/Sade back in mumble-mumble . . . A wonderful evening of live theater in New York. Yes, blog please!
26 June 2015 at 00:24 #40837@purofilion (#40794 above) Hmm, my panel? Can you give me a post #? Did I mention a panel at Wiscon (Madison feminist SF convention, May 21-25)? Blasted memory. Remind me? Thanks —
ichi
25 June 2015 at 07:29 #40826@kharis A question, though — I thought the device that Missy used to kill Dr. Chang, SEB, Osgood, and the two immobilized soldiers supposedly standing guard on Missy in the plane, is what the Doctor aimed at her in the graveyard, intending to use it to kill her. But what the Doctor thanks the CyberBrig for is firing first, past the Doctor, and killing Missy *before* the Doctor could actually fire Missy’s device. If that’s right, then Missy’s victims were killed (or not?) by the channel-changer thingie, but Missy in the graveyard was hit by a blast of some kind from the CyberBrig’s weapon, the gun fastened to his arm and wrist — the same sort of thing that CyberDanny used back at the start of DiH to blast three other Cybermen to smoke, flame, and mangled bits to save Clara from them.
So if Missy didn’t get shot (or dematerialized or teleported) by her own weapon, because the Doctor never fired it (did he?). She got “shot” by the CyberBrig’s gun, which as far as I can tell is supposed to flat out kill you, no teleportation, no nothing. I’m puzzled.
See, this is that “plotty” stuff that not all that important to me (sure, Missy will be back, but the fact of her return and her plans thereafter are of primary interest to me, not unraveling the confusion about what actually “shot” her in the graveyard and how she survived. But if the writers don’t address this puzzle in a satisfactory manner, there’ll be a massive uproar among the fans over the “how” of it (which weapon, and what did it do, and could it do that, or — damn, Moffat has failed us again!) instead of the “why” (because the story has more use for Missy, so here she is and don’t sweat it, let’s watch her scheming unfold).
I hope not (such a waste of energy + clouds of rancor and blame, ugh).
25 June 2015 at 05:23 #40822@kharis Welcome, and thanks for that succinct explanation of why DW is endlessly fascinating even (in fact especially) after many re-watches, while shows like GoT and (yes) Torchwood (IMO) are not: character and character development on the one hand, vs. endless amounts of battles and fights and mayhem *instead of* the slower, subtler play of character and character development. The “instead of” is crucial. GoT has endless violence, sex/flirty innuendo, and raging conflict of all kinds, all of which is deadly boring *unless you also develop the characters so we can give a damn about how the characters fare in and then cope with the fall-out from all the violence, sex, etc.
I think it’s largely a matter of the maturity of the viewer; but then I would think that, since I am pretty mature by now, and value maturity in others. Even in books, I tend to skim battle scenes, sex scenes, and arguments that do nothing but circle the drain endlessly because to resolve them the characters would have to make a leap of growth/understanding/empathy/etc. And then what happens to your next ambush-murder-sex scene, for heaven’s sake, the cheap thrills — the *easy* stuff?
Maybe the best thing that ever happened to DW is the restraint on “adult content” of the kinds described above, due to the “family viewing” designation. The writers/actors are forced by this constraint to entertain without the easy thrills of sex and violence. So it’s been necessary for them to work more with externalizing the characters’ inner lives than just running through fireworks. I see it as comic books at their crudest and most colorful vs. drama with soul, and relatively complex characters trying to work out how to live with each other, or leave each other, or persuade each other to one course or another, or solve dangerous puzzles and mysteries.
I think this difference is vital, and is the source of the deepest divide in fandom — between fans who love a sparkly surface and hate any attention to *why* things happen instead of how (and how fast), and those who feel cheated when a story is all action among characters flattened by the requirement that they not impede the speed and the clockwork intricacies of plot.
24 June 2015 at 00:31 #40793@purofilion Oh, no, there’s a ton more of GoT to go, most of it as yet unwritten by the author himself. “Winter is coming”, as if we could forget it. You know, I have to respect the effort being made in this series to show not just the standard degradation of women in comparatively primitive societies, but the ways in which specific, usually privileged women manage to find some leverage and status to protect themselves and their kids with. This is not a minor point, IMO. I just really resent having to pay for it with a background of deep and continuous brutality and bestial sexism that flattens character in everybody and renders the story in a glum and bloody monotone that almost never lets up. It’s not *history*, after all: it’s a fantastic para-history, over which the author has ultimate power. If he wanted to show more tenderness and feeling, he could, and so could the makers of the series. Their choices are obvious: when in doubt, go for spilled blood, torn flesh, and zombies. It’s the narrow range of a war RPG for adolescent boys (and some girls).
Compare “Penny Dreadful”, which is no less absurd and reductive, but benefits from brilliant visual style and cinematography, plus a relish for taking off in any damn direction they please if it promises some of the insights of looking at gothic events as real and with a slant that offers interesting insights — Okay, I HOPE this is too general to be a spoiler , but warnings anyway —
Sir Malcolm is Dr. Livingstone at his own hearthside after his “heroic explorations” in Africa, beginning to feel the implications and rewards of of his high-handed dealings with slavers and “subject” peoples — the faults enlarged to become the means by which evil can trap him here at home. AND it’s often funny, intentionally or just through being so over the top *and getting away with it* (Well, Eva Green is no slouch to carry it off so well). *And* it’s amazing to hear a harsh feminist diatribe from the mouth of — a very unusual source, damn it, at a time that was, after all, historically the precursor to the rise of feminist resistance to Victorian bondage. Scenery-chewing and (figurative) funereal fainting couches plus subtlety and cheek. For me, this is grown-up fare for people with some background in literature and art. GoT is for the hormonal extremes of raw adolescence, IMO. And it’s deeply stupid sometimes, at a mediocre comic book level. I long to give examples, but restrain myself to avoid spoilage.
I do hope for some development of the several strains of “religion” that have been activated in the GoT world by this past season. Otherwise, I’m gone. What the hell; it’s time I got to work on something of my own . . . maybe after I go and have this nap, now.
23 June 2015 at 23:46 #40790Good lord, can a person *be* “simply Welsh”?! I mean, Wales is part of a large island, so they had to come from somewhere between there and east Africa, so — ? This stuff can get so political — I went on a dig in Ireland years ago with a young archaeology prof who was eagerly seeking evidence of some level of early culture *before* the Celts came (he didn’t like the Celts; maybe he didn’t even believe in them) from northern Europe (I think). He’d found some primitive copper mines that he dated as well before the Celts arrived, was trying to demonstrate that these mines were being worked by residents, not just by visitors based on the Continent.
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