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23 June 2015 at 07:15 #40784
@whisht GoT: I’m up to date on it, I think. (trying not to do spoiler stuff below, but if you’re very averse to any kind of foreknowledge in your story-viewing, please be warned and avoid the rest of this summary ramble)
I’ve watched from the start, tailed off a bit lately — I find the compulsory minor-character-nudity empty and annoying. There’s a problem with so many story lines going at once: something piques your interest, and then it’s gone, buried under more trundling across the (quite striking) landscape between skirmishes and battles. Some narrative lines are going to be more interesting than others, no way around it, so I’ve spent a lot of time waiting for something about Tyrion (and mostly not getting it; you’d think, for instance, that there’d be some mental blowback over a particularly egregious and unconvincingly motivated murder, but so far all he does is drink); or for something unusual building on the very brief but well-acted and intriguing early by-play between Tywin and Arya. No such luck; nipped in the bud.
Tons of stuff happens, lots heavy duty life-changing (or ending) events, and the pro tags a little older and maybe a bit wiser — but in such a culturally confined world, it’s pretty much the same things happening over and over (treachery, wheedling and finagling, attacking or being attacked, strategizing on a necessarily simple model, etc.). Worse, most of the characters react exactly as anyone would react (“You killed B, I want revenge!”), but the result is that they seem flat, and often interchangeable. Each protagonist starts out with one simple goal: to conquer this or that, acquire power (war, war, and more war), or win back the love of x, or escape a dire fate by running into another dire fate. And they stay with it. I’m bored with shallow, monomaniacal people-tokens running their appointed rounds.
A few characters show promise — of becoming more efficient, or maybe more soft-hearted, killers, traitors, dictators, thugs, etc. Most just plod their appointed tracks until they expectedly, or unexpectedly, get killed. Between occasionally flashy and effective set-pieces (the battle of this, the duel over that, the torture or humiliation of so-and-so, a fine CGI dragon-flight), I find myself wishing for a beaker of Tyrion’s wine. All of it. You know how DW varies in tone and feel from episode to episode? As Whisht wrote, this is dour and bloody; and then more of the same.
But I realize that I’m not the intended audience. I haven’t gone for reading pleasure to massive heroic (or anti-heroic) fantasy series in decades. I’ll take wit, character, and confusions that I’m left to figure out to my own satisfaction, over glum soldiers endlessly quarreling and hacking at people, and deviously scheming (or helplessly suffering) women, any time. Much of what many GoT fans love — lovingly detailed jewelry, weaponry, and armor, for example — doesn’t hold my interest. The one aspect that has a spark of life, I’d say, is an area rarely more than lightly touched upon in the show until recently: superstition, spiritual beliefs, and ritual. Come to think of it, that’s the most interesting part of “Vikings”, too.
I guess basically I want to know what’s going on in major characters’ heads, and in GoT that’s too often limited to and focused on right now, where something or somebody is likely waiting to chop off your head or poison your soup at any moment.
22 June 2015 at 22:29 #40770Hi, all — for those interested, found something interesting on Den of Geek this morning; the kicker is in the last couple of exchanges (but I love the whole think — “Truly, Madly, Deeply” is one of the greats, IMO, so is “Galaxy Quest”:
22 June 2015 at 09:53 #40765Okay, I’ve caught two episodes of Strange & Norrell, and I like them very much — but am being driven absolutely crazy by frequent breaks for as much as four consecutive minutes of advertisements to every seven or so minutes of program! They’re running almost an hour and a quarter here, to make room for the god damned ads! It’s maddening!
What I can see, I like; but I think maybe we’re getting a drastically cut version, trimmed to make more space for bloody advertising.
“Penny Dreadful” is rolling along quite brilliantly, very satisfying — with a startling double wallop of downright feminist dialog in Series 2 episode 8 about the “place” and treatment of women in Victorian England; took me very much by surprise. I am a bit downcast, though, by the African character Sembene, who seems to me to very clearly fit the description of a recurrent SF and adventure stereotype that POC have pointed out and drily named “The Magic Negro” — the black “sidekick” who has hidden magical powers which he or she *only* uses to further the interests of his white associates, never showing signs of even having any independent goals or interests of his/her own. The first clearly identified figure of this kind was the black man who helps the young hero in Stephen King’s “The Shining” to deal with supernatural forces in that novel, and as they say, once you see, you can’t unsee; so I call Magical Negro status on Sembene, with apologetic regrets (the actor is excellent and a commanding presence in the story).
I do love it that The Creature, here “John Claire”, that Frankenstein brought to life harks back (at least at the beginning) to Mary Shelley’s original idea of an intelligent, basically sweet-natured being twisted into resentment and violence by the reactions of others to his appearance (and those cold, dead hands, of course). He’s presented as almost a sort of poetic soul of very meek demeanor, not a mute, coarse-framed, looming giant. A wonderful conceit, IMO.
21 June 2015 at 18:44 #40759Thanks, all, for throwing some light on what the heck happened to “Farscape”, which we watched avidly until all the torture scenes got to me and I walked away (some eps had a definite Mel Gibson vibe to them in that respect). Next thing I knew, I couldn’t check back to see if things had changed because — Farscape wasn’t there any more!
19 June 2015 at 06:36 #40724@bluesqueakpip Kind of you to give that warning — Doctor Who *is* strangely addictive. Kind of like watching that recent internet clip of an octopus toting a couple of halves of coconut shells along the sea-bed and then starting what looks as if it will be a rather long process of constructing a shelter or hide-out for itself out of them. You can’t stop looking.
A bit like that . . . or maybe not? I’m on a panel with some colleagues in Boston next month, the title of which is “Guilty Pleasures”, meaning bad influences that secretly helped shape our SF/F/H fandom or writing (or, in one case, becoming a distinguished editor in the field). If we get around to *good* influences, I’ll certainly have to name DW. Though I suppose if I chose carefully, I could claim DW as a bad influence as well, along with EC comics and bodice-rippers . . . and Hammer horror films, of course. But it’s not always easy to tell the good influences from the bad, is it?
19 June 2015 at 06:21 #40723@fatmaninabox psychic pal tells me that old souls often turn to quiet work with plants, animals, and crafts — raise horses out in the desert, work in wineries, do gardening and other horticultural work, and avoid conflict . . . bored (or sick) to death with people doing the same damn stupid stuff over and over. I find this an appealing idea. Anyway, his progress sounds encouraging for you.
18 June 2015 at 21:43 #4070911 June 2015 at 03:24 #40592@gamergirlavatar The Doctor could take up sketching, tutored by Rigsy, as a way for the Doctor to have some way of focusing his prodigious mind *outwardly* when he’s traveling alone, so he doesn’t go neurotic (as in “Listen”) from too much chatter of the monkey mind (*his* monkey mind would be a whole troop of monkeys crowded into a piano — it hardly bears thinking about!). We know he’s hung out with artists before, but not that he’s ever dipped into making art himself — his main preoccupation being “science”, DW style, instead. But why not? A dangerous alien art form could be encountered . . . a caste of artist-priests “drawing” what they perceive to be your true self in biological material, and that forces you to become what they want you to be . . . Rigsy reveals an unexpected flair for drawing from life (we only saw him dealing with graffiti letters spray-painted on walls, but circumstances could force him to expand his skills or reveal some that he’d kept hidden from his more tag-minded pals — ) which he and the Doctor use to — mumble mumble, something or other.
Enough mind wandering; off to pack for a weekend celebrating the graduation of the last grandchild from college. I *will* survive; and the young woman has already begun building herself a career in costume design for stage and (she hopes) film. That’s a lot more than I had organized when I graduated from college, oh, many years ago now . . .
10 June 2015 at 19:45 #40587@gamergirlavatar — Holy cow! I hope Joivan Wade is back as Rigsy his very self — I’ve always wanted to see the Doctor with a modern young artist, given Capaldi’s own art interests — probably not, though. And Rigsy was a very appealing character, IMO. How about one of those “second chances”? Spread ’em about a bit!
8 June 2015 at 21:29 #40568@purofilion Yes, the blackboards and chalk — lovely, that. And I do like the S8 Doctor “taking himself out for a run” — several runs, dotted all over time and space — to find out what he is, show Clara, and us, who he is so we can decide whether we’re going along for the ride or not.
@arbutus I like that, too — KtM as a forward balance for the backward-looking Robot of Sherwood. S8, I think, was a landmark series that will be widely recognized, in time, as a stand-out classic, glitches and all. A bracelet of charms, a carousel of wildly varying animals, it looks to me now like one wildly varied and unexpectedly deep interior adventure, exactly what was needed to anchor a whole new surprise series of incarnations for the Doctor. As for KtM in particular, the fact that discussion of that episode is still alive here (and, to my surprise, on reddit) suggests that it’s a crucial link in the whole ring of S8 stories.
An S9 of madcap adventure and flying wisecracks would seal the unique, interior character of S8; I can’t imagine how else they could follow S8, in fact.
8 June 2015 at 03:09 #40558@spaceageclockwork — oh fr gods’ sake, buy the coat! Buy the coat! What is money for, if not the gratification of our fantasies!
7 June 2015 at 18:43 #40555Crikey, everybody, I feel as if I’m watching Advanced Acrobatics (any contortion sufficiently advanced — ) at a Cirque du Soleil performance! Love it. And now I want that snow globe, please. Best of all, the reminder — always welcome and always needed, IMO — that yes, this DW is science *fantasy* and will always be too far into fantasy for viewers who prefer scientific consistency. “Magic door”? The whole show is a series of “magic doors”.
@phaseshift Yes, I know Potter’s name — “Singing Detective”? Now, that one was a bit too outré for *me*, at the time, and I didn’t stay with it; sometime, I’ll take another crack at it. I didn’t know about the award, so maybe it needs more publicity — or is it well-known in the UK?
@lisa Oh, lovely — ” — All thirteen!” Now, that would be a fine trick to pull off. A question, though — I’ve read in some places that if G. is returned to “normal” space, the Time War takes up where it left off and G. is destroyed; and in others that the plan was for all the enemies converging on G. and attacking it were supposed to wipe each other out with their cross-fire through empty space where G. used to be, so G. would return to a cessation of hostilities because the enemies are now, if not wiped out, at least seriously depleted by having shot each other up after G. vanished. ???
6 June 2015 at 20:29 #40537@phaseshift @JimTheFish I’ve heard from others on “League”, and as an old comic book fan I’m not at all dismissive of the idea that the comic was much better. Where would I find it if I wanted a look now? I haven’t kept up with the comics world, so I’ve no idea of availability status.
Saw “Dreadful” last night, new series — it looks good, better than a kind of all-over-the-place vibe that turned me off the first season. Of course, all over the place is kind of the set-up and remains so. Maybe they’ve settled in enough now that I’ll like the ride better. It’s certainly got style! And very good performances.
6 June 2015 at 20:19 #40536Oops, guess not — the official re-watch hasn’t started over there, so maybe I’ll just leave that, to avoid spoilers. But yes, I do think that the full extent of Rory’s defeat didn’t get across to me as a viewer; and that standing stones scene let him give Rory room to flourish a bit. I wouldn’t have thought of him as Doctor material, though — he was cast around that time as an angel in something I caught a glimpse of once, so what with a ghost and and angel, he’d already struck that “unearthly” vein early on.
6 June 2015 at 18:16 #40535@jimthefish Gonna answer over on the Capaldi re-watch thread, Crow Road thread.
6 June 2015 at 18:13 #40534@phaseshift I like this analysis of KtM’s central choice. And the shout-out to, ah, the other one! Now I want to go back and start re-reading Pratchett (but there are all these library books here . . . gotta read). And you’re quite right that for Clara’s decision to be a choice, it has to be acceptable either way she chooses, which is a good reminder for pro-choice people (I’m one) who, in defense against pretty much ceaseless attack from the hard Right, do have a tendency to settle on abortion as the “better” choice. As for taking up the subject, no matter how tangentially, this is a way of keeping DW tethered to the present, through its live issues — not bad, for a 50 year old show. Especially when it’s the Doctor who is, as you say, pro-choice — having, for once, the option of stepping back — “This isn’t my deal, it’s yours, so have at it, I’m outta here.”
It’s a pretty big step. No wonder the Doctor is so tetchy and abrupt, if you look at it in that light. Parent yields the field of choice to child (those training wheels); age yields the field to youth; male yields authority to female and *not* in a situation of either rebellion or women using “feminine wiles” to get it.
Later, in ItFotN, the fate of Earth is a problem he accepts — but as acceptance of loss, since he can’t “fix” it, and Clara refuses his help on a personal level:”Okay, you can say it’s your deal this time and thanks for that thought, but helpful as you’ve been in the past, you’re still a only tourist here.” He doesn’t get to include himself in this crisis. She excludes him.
6 June 2015 at 00:33 #40526I noticed your mention of EC comics and the Comics Code. Interesting that the League books were written by Alan Moore, and that his run on DC’s supernatural Saga of the Swamp Thing was the first major run that saw one of the publishers say “to hell with this”. It’s rightly well regarded and recommended.
I only know the “League” from that absolutely idiotic nitwit of a movie — want to talk about being violently yanked out of a story by blatant craziness? It was when the submarine sank into a Venetian canal (which are about, what, 8-10 feet deep?), apparently “sailed” beneath the continent of Europe, and surfaced in the Arctic that I gave up entirely.
That’s if I’m remembering it correctly; it was probably much worse than that, but my mind refuses to retain it. And (happily!) I saw it a long time ago.
I didn’t know when the comics guys revolted against the “code”, but thank god they did! What B.S. that was — Dr. Frederick Wertham, Comic Book Denier!
5 June 2015 at 20:05 #40524@arbutus —
. . . he wears his heart less on his sleeve than did Ten and Eleven. Personally, I prefer this! It makes him a little less knowable, more alien.
I like more mysterious conduct, myself; but for me, Capaldi kinda wears his heart on his face, because that face is so mobile and expressive — and wasn’t always so; I think he had to grow into it. I watched The Crow Road last week, in which his face is pretty still, under an enormous cloud of hair that’s probably sprayed to within an inch of its life to keep it from entirely upstaging the man beneath its shadow. He was much younger then, of course, so neither the face nor the man was as developed in terms of acting skills, or maybe he was trying to look enigmatic and grave, as befits a ghost (not a spoiler — he’s a ghost from the get-go, visiting the protagonist and talking to him).
But yes, there are still plenty of moments of deliberate emotional concealment in this Doctor. I was so ready for that after too much Heathcliff (as I read Tennant, as much of him as I could take anyway) and Dancing Jack.
5 June 2015 at 05:29 #40511@bluesqueakpip — Sure sounds like it. It sounds massive and delightful. Luckily, I’m not really up for that kind of crazy ruckus any more (never was, much), and am pledged to a yearly fantasy Con in Saritoga springs, NY, where an old friend is GOH this year, so . . . Can’t get to ComiCon in San Diego either, since they only announced the DW team’s attendance a couple of weeks ago and the downtown accommodation has been booked up by the Con since booking opened in April and again, I’ve committed to be elsewhere (near Boston) that weekend. Drat. I trust there will be good TV coverage and internet clips of all these events (no doubt there will be others cropping up before the end of the 10th anniversary year). Lucky you, Blue, being on the spot.
But what I really want is — S9! Now. Now, I tell you!
3 June 2015 at 06:35 #40492Personally I don’t think the Doctor’s “abandonment” of Clara was reprehensible. It simply was the right thing to do in the circumstance. It was up to the humans to make the decision which affected the fate of their world. The decision is not his to make.
I think the leaving such a huge decision about Earth’s (possible) fate to not just Clara but, quite deliberately, to three *women* of various ages was kind of thrilling, actually; and that it’s the abrupt and irritable way in which he did this that puts him in a bad light. His manner, shall we say, left much to be desired . . . and that too was part of this episode’s being a stage in this arc of wobbly-wobbly, fearful, and emotionally pretty raw self-discovery that CapDoc went through in S8.
Me, I usually like being kicked out of my comfort zone — until I experience that as being kicked too hard, too far, or by accident, and then I object as loudly as anyone else. In this case I enjoyed the experience. KtM didn’t push any of my eject-buttons (or, as @denvaldron put it, nothing like an unfortunate camera angle or an intrusive sound boom yanked me out of the story).
3 June 2015 at 05:58 #40491@jimthefish It’s the character arc(s), taking regen shock (at the beginning of a partial re-set to a whole new sequence of future regenerations) seriously enough to use all of S8 to tell that story in an erratic series of very differing episodes, that’s the boldest throw of S8. I admire the audacity, and the achievement (which I think is considerable). Seeing his arc *without* seeing the new Doctor’s negative self — unsympathetic, impatient, irresponsibly impulsive, in some cases (ItFotN) stymied and sidelined, and harshly “utilitarian” — that would have been a cheat and a failure IMO.
I like your interpretation of KtM as a defiant statement of purpose — sci fi to horror to fairy tale to emotional train wreck (and whatever I’ve missed), take-it-or-leave-it, and on that ground too I admire KtM, the cheek of it, the defiance. I admire it, warts and all. Many others despise and dismiss it for those warts. So be it.
@bluesqueakpip Thanks so much for commenting on KtM from an actor’s viewpoint. Whoah, though — is he supposed to be telepathic? How does that work in stories where he is taken by surprise by what others do or say? I’m not sure I can swallow that — or that he expects his companions to be telepathic too. Lapsing into Asperger’s-like obliviousness to emotional cues, though, that makes sense — he reads her distress, but not all of it — or maybe he does read the abandonment issue but dismisses it as unimportant because it’s not important to *him* (he’s been abandoned himself, hasn’t he, and survived okay?); so later he’s stunned when he realizes that yep, it was *crucial* to her. Your final sentence states perfectly the case against scripts that ring hollow on grounds of disappearing through-lines. I’ve never seen it put so succinctly and clearly before.
It’s that feeling of the actor doing more than his/her fair share of the work, his own job, and the writers’ (undone) job as well, because that’s part of the contract. Maybe it always is (it’s up to the actors to save the writers vv). Maybe Capaldi’s work has such conviction and focus that we just believe he’s found that through-line, so trust him enough to find our own versions of it. After all, one thing he’s not doing this work for is big money — I read somewhere that he was earning more on The Musketeers. This is a dream job for him; so maybe it’s thematically Moffatesque — love conquers all, except for the viewers who are absolutely not conquered, who are choking on warts and spitting them out in disgust.
@denvaldron So where are we? In personal terms, I found overriding satisfaction. You found overriding dissatisfaction. What this means to me is not that you’re mistaken, or that I’m mistaken, but that we agree on the only clear point that everyone agrees on: whatever else each of us may think of KtM, it is deeply *divisive*. So people will be arguing over it, changing positions or sticking to them, for a long time to come. The energy in that, to me, is the energy of art that resonates into the future. I also find satisfaction in that, and hope others can too.
2 June 2015 at 02:02 #40472Everybody — I’ll take the @BarbarLefty quote as definitive on the science — thank you!
To reply to @purofilion’s earlier post (but in the right place this time, as promised over on the TV thread), what I think about the Dotor’s “out of character” behavior (in seemingly abandoning Clara, although the instant the decision is made, he’s right on the spot, so clearly he’s been monitoring events somehow) is that this is a follow-on from the set-up in Deep Breath, where he seemingly leaves her with Half-Face but is, again, actually there monitoring. Only this time he doesn’t leave her “alone” with danger, he leaves her “alone” with a heavy responsibility that requires her to find her own way out, without him saving her (and our, humanity’s) bacon.
Was the decision goofy, convoluted, compromised, etc.? It certainly didn’t help to bringing in the abortion issue. But to me, KtM shows what it means to say that the newly regenerated Doctor is dangerous, unstable, with values and perspectives sometimes alien to ours, and a very poor teacher when he tries to set up a lesson for his companion-pupil instead of simply serving as an example. He’s not a teacher, never was as far as I know, and with his constitutional impatience roused up he makes a major balls-up of it.
He’s trying out Clara’s role, as she tries out his (later, in Flatline). She passes her test; he spectacularly fails his, beginning with setting up a crappy test-question. Yes, he’s a bit crazy (as Moffat says), but t’s not *out of character*, IMO, to have a protagonist fail. For me, the form this failure takes seems coherent with his (for the moment) wibbly-wobbly character. Clara’s reaction seems natural. She didn’t expect a surprise quiz today. Not long ago he was protective of her, in “The Caretaker” (interesting title), even with Danny. Now, in a fit of misjudgment, impatience, and pique, he kicks her out of the nest to fly on her own. She feels outraged and betrayed, and he accepts her judgment and her kicking loose of *him*. Except for that “last hurrah”, MotOE, in which he starts out chastened and rather depressed — until the “Thing” he was hoping for occurs, putting him back in a situation he knows how to handle: a murderous monster wrapped up in a puzzle.
But I write fiction; part of my job is lining up the set-pieces. The rest is filling in the gaps between them, supplying the connective tissue that makes it all hang together sufficiently, and meaningfully enough, to satisfy me. I don’t require it to satisfy anyone else.
2 June 2015 at 01:11 #40471@purofilion Ah — I did say I would put any further comments on the KtM forum, didn’t I? Post #40459, above, for reference. Sorry if I seemed to be lecturing — old teachers’ habits die hard, I’m afraid.
ichi
1 June 2015 at 19:21 #40459But you know what? It’s a big world, and there’s certainly room for all the people who like KtM. But that also means there’s plenty of room for me. It’s a good thing.
An excellent thing, indeed.
Hmmm. You didn’t write ‘A Billion Days of Earth’ by any chance.
Naw. Didn’t have time . . . : )
I’ll go answer a couple of other things on the KtM thread, now that I’ve just realized how to lift text from somebody’s message and italicize it in my own post so I can take some stuff over there to reply to.
@purofilion
I really hope any new members come August won’t start with “oh Jeepers, Moffat has done another duffer. Why don’t they sack him. Let’s sack ‘em all and let them eat cake and …” Well, you get my drift.
I do indeed get it! I don’t think I can stand another round of Moffat 101. Bound to happen, though. I just hope most of it happens somewhere else.
As for my list of books, maybe other folks could add their favorites over on the “Books” list? Someone mentioned Hal Clement’s “Mission of Gravity” — thanks. I was trying to recall that one’s title as a piece of hard SF that I found not just accessible but exciting, even though I was a definitely humanities oriented person. My list was based on a scan of my shelf of oldies and omits whole universes of newer (and older) books than those. There’s so much wonderful stuff! I envy your first encounters with some of the stories that kept me going way back when — me and, happily, millions of other people. Good luck in the hospital library!
Anybody watching “Penny Dreadful”? It’s one black bouillabaisse of a show, and some discussion has arisen about it being centered on a female character, Vanessa, and her Very Weird Problems.
1 June 2015 at 06:41 #40449@purofilion Goodness no, I like Whedon’s work very much! It was unexpected because I usually find modern-dress Shakespeare a bit clunky and stiff (because, I suppose, they’re trying to offset the lack of fancy costumes etc.?) or else they all twitter like birds trying to bring the poor old boy “up to date” or something. This was *much* better than any of that! ichi is no fool.
Most of the time. Or some.
The ep you’re looking for is “The Forest of the Night”, which was an odd title since the story took place in full daylight. Somebody was asleep at the wheel on that. And yes, I liked it anyway; just sat back and thought, right, Burnham Wood has definitely come to Dunsinane and I’m all for it, away we go, fairy lights and all. Why not?
KtM’s failures, whatever they are, whizzed right by me, I think. I was watching faces, gestures, timing, and listening to how the voices worked, and these all pleased me. I’m not fussy, I guess. Well, all right, I may be fussy, but only about the things I care about, which are more likely to be qualities found in live theater than on TV. That’s because the performance level in S8 is good enough to put me there, *almost* in the space with the actors. Much more interested in wild-eyed imagination (giant *spider-things* NOOOOO!) than in science (I take the latter from Tyson and Cox, where it’s got reasonable authority behind it and presenters concentrating on just that, not story telling).
SF reading? I’ve got some ideas. Classics like “Childhood’s End” by Arthur C. Clarke; “More than Human”, Ted Sturgeon; “I am Legend”, Mattheson; “Earth Abides”, Stewart, gorgeous post-Apocolytic novel. Anything by Peter Dickinson. Anything by Alfred Bester. “Judgment Night” by C.L. Moore. I read a ton of the hard stuff back then, but it’s all evaporated out of my head except Jules Verne, so others will have to give you those. Philip K. Dick “The Galactic Pot Healer” — you can read the paranoid psychosis type things of his later. Bradbury, maybe “The Martian Chronicles”. Didn’t he also write “Fahrenheit 451”? Ursula LeGuin, “The Left Hand of Darkness” (a beautiful, radical book that inspired many of my cohort to jump into the deep end of the SF pool). Kim Stanley Robinson, his Mars trilogy for interesting political and environmental themes. “The Sparrow” by Mary Doria Russell — I found it absurd and annoying, but it was and remains popular. Get some reading under your belt, and then go online and check out the Hugo and Nebula Award winners, all lengths plus prize-winning anthologies. Then go to the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award site for suggestions of best gender-bending and feminist SF (the judges there provide comments on their picks, very helpful). There’s a new novel out that’s supposed to be not just brilliant and affecting but funny (dark humor): “The Martian”, by Andy Weir. It’s on my reading stack now.
Um, yes, I write professionally, first published in 1974, a dozen novels since, maybe as many short stories/novellas, most still in print one way or another. My of-noteness is probably fading fast, since I haven’t published anything new in several years. I’ve reached the “Who’s that?” stage, and that’s at a feminist SF convention, so . . .
Thanks for the love, and appreciation of my verbal meanderings; there’s nothing like a chat with smart people.
1 June 2015 at 03:14 #40442@denvaldron Also Judy Merrill — I was just thinking of a novel she wrote with Cyril Judd, pub. 1952, that remains (in memory, at least) a piece of SF that I loved to bits. She wrote short fiction on her own, but I can’t think of another novel-length piece by her (with or without someone else). And yes, women were being kept in the kitchen again after their horrifying break-out into the factory in WWII, when all the guys were gone into the services.
Plenty of idiots here are trying desperately to drag us back into those times (again, Texas, but of course not only), but the tide is against them and they will lose in the long run; the problem is, *how* long? I don’t think I can old out that long, myself, which makes me sad.
Oh yes, I’ve read a bit about the other Trog — last I heard, he was backpedaling as fast as he could, trying to distance himself from Beale whom he’s finally realized isn’t going to do his own career any good. Pair of antediluvian cretins, an embarrassment to the field; although we’ve always had our share of gun-blasting imperialistic misogynistic warmongers in SF, only these days the war fever is more commonly found in “heroic” fantasy, i.e. Game of Thrones, Gardens of the Moon, etc. SF seems to me (literary SF, not movies, of course) much more focused on more arcane matters of culture, psychology, and so on, especially books that come from the UK — thinking of Blindsight here.
The Comic Code persuaded my mom to ban my beloved EC comics from out apartment, so I stored them at the home of my best friend at the time. Unfortunately, they perished somewhere along the way from then to now, unfortunately . . . idiotic times. I can’t watch “Mad Men” because I lived through those times, and I do not want to be taken back to them now in any form (much as our Right Wing would love to drag us all there). Great comics (again — in memory). Scared myself to death with them (“The Vault of Horror”, “The Crypt of Terror”, and “Two Fisted Action Tales”, among others).
1 June 2015 at 01:27 #40439@denvaldron Oh, no argument there — I was one of those lots of girls who read SF/F/H as a little, and then a bigger, kid; but nobody was thinking of us “invisibles” in their writing or editing, except for a handful of people. The field itself was indeed oriented toward young males, and the SF editors by and large clung to that idea long after it was heavily compromised by the female fan-base outing itself and storming the barricades (I’m thinking of some SF conventions I attended in the seventies and eighties at which female readers showed up in numbers, but were basically ignored, constantly interrupted, or just plain shouted down by male con-goers and, often, panelists).
Thank you for “not a moment too soon”. It’s been my contention for decades that SF was in fact saved from staleness by the New Wave, yes, but much more so by the incoming feminist wave. The New Wave brought in stylish sophistication from mainstream, as I recall, but the feminist wave simply threw open the gates on an entire half of human experience — women’s half, to put it very roughly, and that of the “soft” sciences — that had been pretty much ignored by the mostly male writers who preceded them. There were always exceptions, of course — Ted Sturgeon, Naiomi Mitchison (“Memoirs of a Spacewoman”), Chad Oliver, and a few others, plus some female authors who wrote under male pseudonyms for practical reasons (Andre Norton is an example of a gender-ambiguous name, another dodge — but they were seen, I think, as outliers and only for specialized [that is, mature] SF readers. This opening up brought in a flood of new energy and breadth of perspective that re-invigorated the whole filed, IMO.
The current Hugo uproar was begun by a troglodyte writer of reactionary militaristic SF in Texas, which should come as no surprise. That’s bloody Texas for you (apologies to the liberal Texans brave enough to stay there with the crazies — Texas just passed an Open Carry law, according to H. Post). I’m staying avoiding WorldCon this year to avoid being entangled in it, and staying away from Texas (the scene of a very nice yearly con called Armadillocon) until the Open Carry law is gone, and maybe not even after that . . .
31 May 2015 at 22:18 #40435I found “The Crow Road” online and am watching — first reaction: my god, how these characters *drink*! Every time somebody says, “I’m off, long drive ahead, etc.” somebody else says, “How about a drink before you go?” meaning a good stiff one, whisky not wine or beer. Wow.
31 May 2015 at 22:13 #40434@IAmNotAFish “The Golden Age” quote seems to me only to apply to pulp SF of the forties and fifties — the “little boy” stories of war, rebellion against (any) authority (since it was all bad, as I recall), and girls strictly cardboard cut-outs. It’s exactly what the Old Guard meant when they stormed about snarling about all these damn newfangled thingies taking over the genre (New Wave from England first, then women and feminism. It’s also what I heard from several editors when I was marketing the first two books of a 4-book series about gender wars in the near-ish future; they said, “Most of our readership is kids and young men, and they won’t read stories with women in lead roles”, and “This is great! Just turn all the characters in it into men, and we’ll take it!”
Seriously. I’m talking about 1976 or so; and IMO, these editors (both of them women, by the way) were way behind the curve, because female readers were coming out of the closet in droves by then, and buying books about female as well as male characters. But that’s the way that generation of editors thought (with exceptions; the book in question was bought in the end by David Hartwell).
On “Fringe”, I liked it for a while, didn’t see Bishop as a comedy loon at all but as a tragic figure who’d had his brains scrambled by Evil Forces, which I think was what the writers intended, but strokes and folks. Anyway, I got bored when the show became all gummed up with that alternate worlds stuff, doubling many of the characters into a confusion I just didn’t care enough about to spend time sorting out, so I quit.
Whedon’s “Much Ado” I found unexpectedly lithe and charming, freed from the weight of period costuming and sets.
And S8 — yep, the more you look, the more you see, in my experience with it, and the bolder it is. But I should have realized that just from the amount of immediate negative balderdash in comments from fans. Some of them just hated the loopy “science” of episodes like KtM, but maybe that’s easier to look past on re-watch, so that the virtues become visible. And of course any time you step (let alone charge) out of the established comfort zone, there will be weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth from those who were the most comfortable (or those who most needed that comfort, perhaps). I have a feeling that we’re going to see a swerve back into the old grooves in S9, which will leave S8 as a one-off feat of considerable audacity. And I’m not sure how I’ll feel about that, if it turns out to be true.
30 May 2015 at 22:39 #40425@denvaldron Good commentary, thank you. Star Trek was very influential in what must have seemed later a surprising way. When I started going to SF conventions in the mid-seventies, I was part of a substantial wave of women invading convention-space in vocal numbers (the fan boys *hated* this, but mostly seem to have gotten used to it now). Every one of them that I talked to said at one point or another that they had become fans of SF because of watching the original Star Trek, cheesy and wheezy and downright silly as it was. They — we — were responding to that comparative liberalism (or maybe just open-mindedness) on the show, which looks like pretty weak tea now but which for the time was quite striking. Women who hadn’t really glommed onto SF as their literature had learned to resent reading and seeing stories in which female characters were either absent, or were the usual servant/prizes/wide-eyed nincompoops, and which were usually about war or the subjugation of the Other or both (not that all SF ever was this, but an awful lot of it was), and they learned that not only from the revived feminism of the time, but from watching, yep, Star Trek. POC to this day hark back to Uhura (“mommy, look — a black woman who isn’t a maid!” Whoopie Goldberg remembers exclaiming) as their personal breakthrough to the idea that yes, you could be non-white but still be present in the a future of space adventure. Star Trek was special, never mind the salt and pepper shakers Bones used to diagnose illness . . .
30 May 2015 at 22:24 #40424@jimthefish — about people not falling love with Firefly until giving it a second look: in discussions elsewhere, I’ve seen quite a number of people say exactly the same thing about DW S8 — that they only start to really see its virtues on re-watch. I guess that’s what happens when you take an established format and do unexpected things with it. Some people give up and walk away — “This isn’t anything like X, it’s not what I come to this show *for* and I despise it” — while others give it another go-round and this time see past their own expectations to what’s actually been accomplished, and then they’re in love with it.
29 May 2015 at 19:19 #40412@janetteb Thanks! I hope they’ll do re-runs the week after, because I’ll be attending a grandchild’s graduation that weekend and probably won’t get too see the debut. Looking forward, though!
29 May 2015 at 07:16 #40409I don’t think Strange Norrel has started here in the US, has it? Anybody know where or when it starts? I’ve seen some ads, but they seem to have gone away now; or maybe it’s just that I haven’t been watching much tv lately . . . I did try the book, could not get past the slow open, so I’m very happy that we have a visual version now to enjoy.
ichi
27 May 2015 at 01:38 #40382@lisa Thanks for the link, above; I looked a bit deeper, and found that this man did in fact go and study Buddhism in situ pretty extensively, so I wouldn’t lump him in with the California-style New Age dabblers and cherry-pickers who emerged from the hippie movement in the US to become “spiritual leaders” by peddling pared down and cobbled up versions of this or that “exotic” spiritual tradition. Reading on, however, I note that he then seems to have “revived” a previously long extinguished branch (?) of Buddhism and made that the basis of the influential position he seems to have attained in Australia, despite having been written out of the lineage of his Thai school and not being accepted as a teacher of an authentic tradition by the folks he’d done his studying with or their students.
This behavior — creating a “new” but “authentic” version of the source tradition, packaging it and selling it on under your own authority as the real deal and making a successful career this way — falls right into the US tradition of religious con artists making up their own stuff so they can be “authorities” with the dignity (and the income, I assume) of an established spiritual leader along the lines of the Tibetan rinpoches who come through the US on teaching and fund raising tours. Whether he’s cherry-picked legitimate Buddhist content or not I wouldn’t know, since I’m no Buddhist scholar myself, and the same goes for evaluating the positive and useful weight of what he’s teaching, but personally, I do think I recognize the pattern of what he’s done, and I’d stay well clear of him, myself. People who do this have, I think, a tendency to succeed because they do in fact cherry pick — in order to sell us a more comfortable version of an exotic tradition, one carefully cut to suit Western tastes. Which is probably something that could be said as well of Reform Judaism and some breakaway styles of Christianity as well, so . . . ?
26 May 2015 at 08:56 #40372@arbutus Yes, Buddhism has been subject to all sorts of abuse from the dippier members of the “New Age”, partly because a bunch of teachers came through in the last half of the 20th (and before, I think) while the New Age/Hippie Potpourri was in full swing, particularly in California, and got all mixed up together as people wandered from one “exotic” spiritual tradition to another looking for something that suited them (you should read the discussions of Native American spiritual tradition being co-opted and then sold to “seekers” in diluted, distorted, and sometimes dangerous forms all over the Southwest and other formerly Indian territories, and beyond.
Buddhism though — in my (limited) experience, a much more complex interaction happened and continues to happen, mainly through considerable traffic between the US and Japan by people actually going to study Zen Buddhism in Japanese temples, monasteries, and schools and coming back to the US to teach bearing some pretty impressive credentials (and quite strict and tough practices). At least one Japanese teacher established a now-famous monastery in Northern California (it’s the one Leonard Cohen spent 8 years studying in), and by all accounts this is no cherry-picking exploration looking for spiritual goodies to grab.
So the Buddhist tradition that has flourished here seems to be a pretty rigorous and sturdy one, modeled exactly on the tradition as it exists in Japan. The types of Buddhism that were carried to other SE Asian countries where they merged with local animist traditions, full of demons and spirits etc, haven’t done well here, as far as I know; US SBNR’s seem to take more to a discipline where you sit and meditate (or walk around and meditate), with or without a Ko-an to solve, than to the more colorful styles full of dances and festivals, formal studies of historical/intellectual content, and spells to ward off demons; I would imagine that Japanese practitioners of Zen Buddhism are undisturbed by US practice, while those in Thailand, for example, see Zen — in America or in Japan — as a distortion, or a mistaken derivative of their own belief systems. But you’d have to ask them — a lot of them, since Buddhism has different branches and, presumably a range of reactions to American style Buddhism. I don’t think it’s useful to tar that famous Buddhist monastery in N. California (whose Japanese founder died recently at the age of 102, I think after decades of teaching here) with the same brush I would use on, say, Sedona, Arizona, a town that makes its living on its many forms of somewhat kaleidoscopic “spiritual” offerings.
I also wouldn’t put down people who self-identify as SBNR as cherry-pickers. I think a great majority of them now, well past the days of the Hippies, are sincere explorers of spiritual traditions who have found that institutionalized belief systems don’t make sense to them, and who go their own ways — and not all those ways lead to a “Nature is my god” position by any means.
26 May 2015 at 08:21 #40368@purofilion So sorry about Crohns. I’m glad to hear that you have good treatment available — feel better soon!
ichi
20 May 2015 at 09:10 #40236@purofilion Reincarnation not only isn’t much accepted in the West, it’s also not a uniform belief system where it *is* accepted. There are a number of different versions of how it might work, e.g. the Dalai Lama probably believes that it’s a straight progression from “lower” to “higher” spiritual awareness, with detours to live a bug’s life when you’ve been bad. I don’t think of it that way at all. Luckily for all those Buddhists out there, I guess, including the ones who believe in demons and lots of other frills left over from previous religions in Buddhist areas, I’m not the Dalai Lama . . .
But I like the analogy, in this case, between regeneration as portrayed in DW and what I think about how reincarnation works.
“Bah!” is a perfectly appropriate response; so is “I kid”. Can’t prove anything one way or the other, so not to worry. And thanks re long-windedness, but it should work the other way around, shouldn’t it? I’m a writer by trade, so I should be skilled enough to be more *concise*! (Alas, it seems — not in this lifetime!)
20 May 2015 at 08:17 #40234@janetteb I agree, each new Doctor isn’t exactly “a new man”; he seems to be an amalgam of his previous selves, but subsumed under a fresh mix of the elements that make up his present personality. There are memories of his previous personalities, but they’re mixed in now as memories, not as the discreet, living moments of awareness that they once were. SmithDoc foresees the winking out of his living awareness, his particular personality, during regeneration when the new personality is stirred together, which is also what TennantDoc means by “I don’t want to go”. “I” is that personality, which won’t be lost as a set of memories but will shut down as an active, integrated awareness that once was this “I” Doctor. That’s what makes sense to me, and also correlates with our human stages of growth in a given lifetime: I have (some) memories of my childhood including feelings (some of them) attached to those memories, but that child’s awareness is gone, grown over, by later stages of me leading up to now, this stage, which is in some ways a different personality that that kid-me was (and, in memory, remains as a fixed being).
Why is it so much fun to chat about this stuff? I guess because we only find out what we think about it by actually thinking about it, and putting that into words? Brain exercise; thought maneuvers. Love it.
20 May 2015 at 08:04 #40233@purofilion — The Doctor’s memory . . . He’s said, from time to time, that he remembers everything, every detail, presumably as a way of honoring the reality and events of each segment of his lives and each of his companions with their mayfly lifespans, or at any rate of assuring them that long as he lives, each matters to him and he will never forget them.
But I think he does forget them by compartmentalizing, the way people who live a long (for us) time don’t keep everyone they knew along the way present and in mind all the time. He says he remembers; so either he’s telling the truth or he’s lying to make the mayflies feel better about not staying in his life for good. If he’s telling the truth, and every moment impresses itself indelibly on his memory, what does that mean for someone who has lived so many moments? I can’t help but think of it in a practical way, because I tend to think that way.
If you had ten lifetimes of different lengths but adding up to a couple thousand years, there’s just no way, IMO, that you could keep all of those memories at the top level of your memory — where the short term memories of “just now” are kept but just below them the longer term memories of “a few years ago” and “when I was a child” and everything in between. This allows you to be present in this moment, undistracted by the past(s), so that a) you can deal with *now* however is required, and b) so that you can pay it enough attention to turn it into an indelible memory in its turn. So I think that CapDoc, for instance, *can* remember, say, Amy, but normally he simply doesn’t. When Half Face has captured him and Clara in those elevator-chairs and CapDoc needs her to pass him the sonic, he mutters, “It’s times like this I miss Amy”, who had long legs and so was better suited than short Clara to reaching out and grabbing the dropped sonic with her feet. Those little asides referencing long-past experience indicate that he does have it all stored up, as promised — but mostly tucked away out of sight and out of mind so he can freely and clear-sightedly deal with the demands of the “top layer” of now.
To my mind, it’s a similar arrangement to the way we humans deal with our own successive reincarnations: we don’t (normally) remember our previous lifetimes because those memories would be dangerously distracting and confusing *now*. I can’t imagine another way (but multi-compartmentalizing) of retaining all of that many lives’ experience (ours of the Doctor’s) that would be completely crazy-making and paralyzing if constantly all top layer, no matter how many pianos’ worth of brain you might be stocked with.
And you’re no windier than I am, puro.
19 May 2015 at 17:19 #40225@IAmNotAFish — Oh, I loved “Dead Like Me” — bought the set after the series closed out. Lovely, funny, sad, and plenty of angst to go round as well. It was appointment TV in our house, back in the day.
19 May 2015 at 08:23 #40209I can’t find link to it, but there’s an interview with Moffat in New York that ended with his comment (answering a question I can’t remember) elucidating, I think, previous remarks about how the companion is more the protagonist than the Doctor is in DW. He said that the Doctor himself is always the same man — he doesn’t really change inside, only on the outside — but the companions change when they travel with him, and “his tragedy is that they all leave him, or he outlives them, and he’s left alone afterwards, just a boy in a box. They never stay even if they love him, and the sad thing is, he always loves them more than they love him.” More or less, though not an exact quote.
?? Well, we certainly saw that with S8 Clara since she was ready to settle down with Danny, although the Doctor has been coaxing her to head out with him in the Tardis through most of the series and she claims to be addicted to him and his weird life. But my question is — *why* does he become so attached to his ephemeral Earth companions? He *knows* how it’s going to end (11 actually says so, rather resentfully and self-pityingly, justifiably so). He just can’t seem to get himself, oh, maybe a shark or a sea turtle to travel with, instead of some human butterfly with the attention span of a goldfish (comparatively) and a habit of dying or “wandering off” and, eventually, not coming back. I mean, we are nifty and all, within our limits, but really, but are we his best option for long-term company?
Or maybe he counts on us to take off before he gets bored with us, because long-term isn’t truly what he’s looking for? This kind of touches on the question of enduring relationships among intelligent life forms that live very long lives . . . disposables in series is one solution, isn’t it? Not a nice thought.
There’s a wonderful novel, maybe 10-15 yrs old now, “The Vintner’s Luck” by Elizabeth Knox (of New Zealand, I think), about a fallen angel’s lifelong relationship with a French wine grower in the 19th c. Yeah, I know; but she makes it work.
In the end (I’m going to SPOIL it, for the sake of another sort of solution, so stop here if you care) —
In the end, the human dies and his soul goes to God in a state of the utmost perfection that it ever attained in life, young and spotless, as “pure” and perfect as we ever get to be; but the angel rejoices in having had, over years of visits to the vintner, the much rougher, tastier, slowly maturing “pressing” of the man’s soul spread out over most of his lived lifetime, a far richer soul “vintage” than mere raw, unblemished perfection. Okay, I was going to tie that in somehow with the Doctor getting to sample a fleeting “vintage” from our short but rapidly changing lives, but I’m not sure it works. Very good book, though, beautiful and moving. Well, my own taste is for wabi sabi, the beat-up beauty of much-used things, and that doesn’t work for everyone, so no, the book never became a best seller . . .
19 May 2015 at 01:54 #40202@lisa — well, you’re onto something there (Scary Poppins the nanny), but couldn’t it also be that MissMaster is framing herself as Clara’s stronger, smarter, more connected-to-the-TL-Doctor rival for his regard? Too soon to tell, I think.
19 May 2015 at 01:51 #40201@arbutus Mmmm, I agree — it would be awfully tough to synchronize enough of the changes involved in Regeneration x 2 such that the couple involved could keep a satisfactorily balanced relationship going for more than one lifetime or two, and that’s assuming that TL’s have some conscious control over the regen process, which doesn’t seem to be the case (at least not commonly, or in predictable ways — “I never know where the faces come from”, for example). Long life (minus regens) has been addressed by several good SF writers as what do you do with marriage when humans routinely live to be several hundred years old? Most solutions are either short-term contract marriages (20 yrs renewable), or flexible affiliational groups within which couples, trios, etc. shift and change with the changing desires of the members concerned. *Nobody* assumes that X marries Y and they stay married (in the 1:1 sense til death that’s the ideal in the West) for 150 years.
Reminds me — Jarmusch’s recent vampire movie, “Only Lovers Left Alive”, posits a vampire couple (probably Adam and Eve) who drift around without seeing each other for centuries and then come together again for sex and companionship for a while . . .
Anyway, MissMaster’s fixation on the Doctor suggests that she broods a bit on past relationships, though she’s so fiercely concentrated on herself and him *now* that I doubt that she goes so far as to wish she’d stayed alive back then. She doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who second-guesses herself that way — to egotistical for regrets. You’re right about the perversity, in her eyes, of the Doctor’s penchant for human company — she refers to us, dismissively, as his “pets” in DiH, which is not an unreasonable take, IMO. It’s the *intimacy* (not sexual so much as emotional and psychological) that the Doctor manages to achieve (to one degree or another) with humans that makes us so valuable to him, I think; and that’s what MissMaster is jealous of.
it is, after all, what everyone seeks: “Just see me,” whole and complete, as my unvarnished self. Not just trust, but ultimate trust is the prize — that even betrayal can’t make a dent in. Who doesn’t hunger for that? And how maddening, how unfair it must seem that the Doctor somehow manages to find it, alien and crazy as he is. But not with the one other surviving member of his kind (never mind that s/he is lethally nuts). Clara better watch her own back in S9, when MissMaster is around . . .
19 May 2015 at 00:12 #40194@jimthefish (I think) re Osgood’s death: “. . . it was a significant character beat for both the Doctor and the Master. It emphasised that for all her whackiness, Missy is dangerous, lethal even. And it showed the Doctor that by not taking Missy seriously enough, he ended up getting someone killed. Of course, his battles with the Master lead to lots of collateral damage but it’s not that often that we see the Doctor forced to confront it in this way. It’s a significant moment because it changes our attitudes to both characters.”
Thanks for that point — that not only was it a casual show of favor from the Doctor that put the final nail in Osgood’s coffin, but that *he didn’t notice that his invitation to her was a problem until he came back and found Osgood’s glasses and got the message. I hadn’t thought of this in terms of it being his fault for not having the nous to avoid stinging MixMaster like that; which is, of course, also part of his basic nature as well as his slowly resolving internal discombobulation through S8. The death did certainly highlight MixMaster’s spitefulness in a way that should serve as a warning to the Doctor henceforward to *pay better attention* to the negative capacities of the Master, even the cheery, flirty Master in Victorian/Edwardian drag (including, perhaps, the female body as part of the “drag” aspect).
@lisa Re the MixMaster/Clara relationship; there’s some tricky twist at the bottom of it, so it’s hard to get a firm-feeling grip on what, exactly, MixMaster sees when she looks at Clara, and what she means by her comments. Whatever their background relationship, I agree with @puro and @arbutus that MixMaster is definitely jealous of the intimate personal entanglement between Clara and 12 because she wants to have some version of that with him herself. I doubt that she sees her younger self in Clara, because I don’t think MixMaster sees anyone as “like” her in any way — except the Doctor, who, maddeningly from her perspective, refuses to acknowledge it. S9 should throw some better light on the situation.
@denvaldron @craig Well, when newbies come bounding in announcing that Clara is rubbish, or that the only worthwhile Doctor was 10, or that x or y on the creative team is a lazy bum bent on “ruining” the show, they do tend to draw some well-deserved fire from the locals, who are past such flat, self-important inanities and aren’t too interested in spending a lot of time educating an obstreperous newbie who hasn’t bothered to glance over the FAQ. The newbie either catches on quick and hangs around for the good stuff, or takes off in high dudgeon (good). People who come to Craig’s party with their manners turned on while they suss out the local culture are, AFAICS, welcomed in and treated kindly. So “smacking around” to any degree is strictly case by case, I think, and never arbitrary. Which is one of the great attractions of Craig’s “party” for fans who love the show more than they love showing off, IMO.
18 May 2015 at 10:12 #40166@janetteb @DenValdron @ScaryB I loved BG Who as a kid, but now I have a hard time watching the older shows. They just don’t hold my attention the way they once did. That doesn’t make them lousy, or invalidate my taste then or now; just c’est la vie, and more my loss than anything else, when I think about it.
As for S8, I liked it, partly because it was such a wild ride from one kind of story to another (that’s my take on what some see as a just mess), all built around what kind of person this old/new/Doctor is and can be. Capaldi just blew me away, and so did Coleman because I hadn’t thought much of her in S7. Suddenly she rose to the challenge of a terrific co-lead and some inspired writing (and also some less inspired writing, granted — which is a challenge in its own right). S8 renewed my interest in DW after some very desultory viewing of everything from the end of Eccleston through the end of Smith. It was the change of pace, that tighter focus on character, that daring variety of stories ranging from creeping terror to old-style SF adventure (including goofy science, as I remember it from the pulps) to fairy tale fantasy to Ten Little Mummians to dorky Errol Flynn pseudo-historical fiction to crime caper to the techno-Gothic horror of the Nethersphere — Hell, I loved it all.
Then, re-watching, I saw the details, and my god, what a feast! Beautiful details of writing (“The Doctor is lost in the ruin of himself” — what an elegant, brilliantly accurate line that is), fascinating details of acting technique (Clara standing in the street after Danny’s death with that dulled, flat look of the suddenly bereft), just amazing. Failures? Sure (oh, the skovox blitzer — too damn much damp graveyard in DiH etc/). But so many gems amid the dross — the more I look the more I see. I am a happy doggie, with high hopes for S9. It’s the constantly shifting synthesis of sharp, talented minds that so delights me. I’m a fan of chamber music, these past couple of decades — big egos + big talent, working together in service to the realization, however flawed, of an ideal that was never perfect to begin with. That’s life, that’s art — food for the hungry soul. Gotta shut up now, it’s late. I am not responsible . . .
@burrunjor I appreciate your kind remarks about my posts. I’m impatient by nature, and have consequently learned over 7 + decades that losing my temper, or venting frustration, is almost invariably a mistake for me. I end up realizing that I was either angry over a misunderstanding, or blasting the wrong person, or just too pissed off or cranky to think straight. So I try, not always successfully, for moderation and clarity, which also often makes my posts excessively long (*every* damn thing has a downside, as I’m sure you’ve noticed). Also I was a teacher, and still occasionally am, so I’m used to thinking out loud. All of that seems to help me keep my balance in discussion. Everyone has to find their own way to do that; sometimes advancing decrepitude is the only way . . . I wish better, faster success to anyone else who’s looking for moderation and for clarity. Or fun and pleasure rather than strife.
best,
ichi
18 May 2015 at 05:51 #40158@lisa I like your take on the Missy question (well, probably because it lines up with my own!). MissMaster is playing — playing a satirical cartoon of the femme fatale, playing the seductress, playing for power. Being female doesn’t seem to me to have anything to do with it. Being a *real* control freak (who is incidentally and for the time being, anyway, female) is this person’s nature, as opposed to, for example, Clara, who’s an amateur at this, willful and focused but not insisting on control of others for control’s sake. I think “Missy” is all performance, but the goal isn’t sex, although to such a person sex can always employed as a weapon or a means of control (not here though — “family viewing” — you want the kids behind the sofa, not staring at the screen and asking you why that lady is so mean to the Doctor). The Master’s goal is not just “You win (this round)” but total victory, the adversary captured, broken down, and re-shaped to suit her own bloodthirsty tastes. She wants to provoke him into some act of mad violence of the kind typical of herself, to *make* them “alike”. She wants him made capable of at act just as callous and wicked as the murder of Osgood.
If I’m right (and I have no special insight that insures that I am), we should have a very interested S9 indeed . . .
18 May 2015 at 00:38 #40152@arbutus — Thank you for that response! You and your husband have made my day . . .
16 May 2015 at 19:27 #40134@IAurellie Confusing isn’t the half of it! I’m constantly being surprised to find
new posts and conversations here (like this one, to me) that don’t show up (?)
under the link “recent activity” — weird. And how’d I get stuck here with double
spacing all of a sudden? ???!!!!
Thought this was interesting– what else will the political split between England & Scotland bring? Hope this link works . . .
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-32736153
13 May 2015 at 06:30 #40109A great scientist, lived to be quite old, and who for other reasons reminds me of — CapDoc! It’s the hair, people! And maybe the eyebrows, it’s hard to tell what with the glasses and all. But her picture startled me — an Auntie on Gallifrey?! She also sounds like a tough lady, which she would have had to have been. I love the way the internet is slowly but surely bringing these forgotten, or deliberately hidden, women of science who’ve been largely forgotten, til now, but our cultural memory (such as it is, and that’s a pretty poor “such” to begin with):
13 May 2015 at 06:19 #40108@jimthefish I agree on Gallifrey; and I have to say that I find the Doctor’s persistence in trying to find the place puzzling. This may sound odd, but — my maternal grandparents were immigrants to the US from Austria, around the turn of the 20th c. They left for good reasons (mostly having to do with the military draft), rattled around their new country, and never, ever, not once that I know of, expressed any desire to go back “home” (although they did still have relatives there — but maybe that was a reason to stay away?). And they were only a mere handful of decades away from “home” when I knew them.
The Doctor left Gallifrey because he couldn’t stand it, or maybe just the demands being made on him, or failure to live up to those demands; okay. But that was lifetimes ago, for him. He assumes his family is dead, never talks about them, and seems to love bumming around the universe more than staying put for more than a short while, being a restless, erratic-by-nature, curiosity-driven creature.
So what’s the big deal about going back to Gallifrey? I could understand when he was full of guilt over having destroyed the place, but that’s been cancelled, so — ??? Sure, we have the Odyssey for the reliable story trope of the wanderer making his way by hook or by crook back home; only Odysseus was the King of Ithaca. He had a wife and son there (and a faithful hound, let’s not forget). What’s drawing the Doctor back to a place that’s treated him pretty shabbily in the past and was an ill fit to begin with?
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