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3 May 2015 at 18:15 #39778
Somewhat tangential, but interesting, I thought:
3 May 2015 at 08:44 #39766@purofilion Well, that’s me, really — an old chestnut? Could be; you never know . . . so grrr away if it suits you. What I mean is, I think that everything is basically energy in some (temporary and always changing) form, and that energy is also — numinous? Luminal? Numismatic? Ah, not supernatural (since everything that is, is natural or it wouldn’t be here), but has other dimensions than the physical, and those dimensions are as real and significant as physicality is, and is native to our souls (which I have no doubt at all that we have, or are).
But as to being religious: no, not by any definition that I know of. I have no creation myth or long story connected to this idea of knotted energy + metaphysical dimensions. I have no rituals (although I do a chi gong routine for personal energy when I remember to). I have no rules except the root rule of a civil society (try to treat everyone as decently as you’d like them to treat you) which I consider common sense, not a “law” dispensed by the hand of a godly messenger. I believe in the existence of no God of gods or other superior metaphysical beings, so there’s nothing to worship, really. Unless you take concentrated attention to be a form of worship (as in Zen meditation/contemplation), which I do not.
So yes, I consider myself spiritual (the universe has beyond-physical significance) but not religious (no God(s), no doctrine). Or, I’m atheist but not materialist. If there’s a mob of others out there who have similar beliefs, I don’t know them and I don’t seek them out because, why? If you have no rituals and no complicated moral doctrine, you don’t need a “congregation” of like minded persons to congregate with and to be “religious” with. I don’t consider myself “deeply spiritual”, but someone who sees the reality in a particular way, a product of my personal history of observation, reading, study, asking questions, meditation, fooling around with some out-of-the-way practices to find out about them and then generally forgetting about them, and so on, and therefore of no particular use to anybody else.
As for Oz (mmm, like that — vowel glide and alliteration!), I can’t say — I’m American born, raised in Manhattan, living with husband in the SW state of New Mexico these past 45 yrs or so.
best,
yr old chestnut, Ichi
3 May 2015 at 08:17 #39765@purofilion Oh, it’s a thing, all right. That ship has incontrovertibly sailed, IMO.
And yes, of course, one can flee from terrible memories and everything that brings them up again. But even if Danny were sort of hiding out at Coal Hill School, for the purpose of giving the poor man some dimension an army mate could have tracked him down and contacted him out of worry about him, or looking for help from him, and then we would have seen Danny respond to that overture, and how that response (whatever it might be) could complicate his relationship with Clara. He would have had his own secrets — not just something crude like an unintended death in the chaos of war.
You know, this is *exactly* why fans write fan fiction — to stop the awful itch of possibilities left crying out for development, interesting side-paths compelling exploration although the TV stories had to rush past them. So I don’t dismiss fan fiction as a sub-sub-genre out of hand. The impulse is an honorably creative one, a response to a call from the source material (which can only call if it’s got some good, strong life that’s still trapped in there, unused), without the lure of profit as part of the equation. The Slash stuff is usually awful (but not always), as that horrible 50 Tons of Trash demonstrates; but even there, you can find exceptions to the rule of semi-literate idiocy (50 Tons, perfect example of the idiocy part).
The Bad-Tempered Schism does not agree with me on this, I think, but then a bad temper often leads to misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and lost joys, don’t you think? While the Ring of Bleble is so irritatingly *cheerful* most of the time — “Ring Around the Roses” is chiming in my head, damn it. Maybe sleep will prove a cure, before this whole thing takes off somehow and keeps me from sleeping for a week . . .
3 May 2015 at 05:06 #39762@purofilion Yep, *you* are responsible for the Ring of Bleble”, and don’t you forget it! I just borrowed it for a joke . . . I like the sound of it so much! Yes on the orphanage background — which could have been made more real and significant if he’d gotten news of the orphanage, welcome or not, and been given a moment to react (the orphanage is closing? A staff person there that he loved but left behind has died? The orphanage is beginning to receive kids adopted from abroad but then dumped by disappointed adoptive parents?). It’s *because* he was a nice guy that people feel so disappointed in him.
Dang it. No wonder the Schism is bad-tempered.
3 May 2015 at 03:46 #39760@doctorfoo I think maybe the writers aren’t fully aware of the effects in S8 of having a suddenly very amped-up level of acting from their leads, so they didn’t realize that they really needed to also amp-up the writing for Danny, since he had to be more than a mere spear-carrier to be accepted as a legitimately strong influence on both Clara and the Doctor. Not that there’s anything wrong with spear-carriers (the generally one-dimensional/one function characters supporting a story around the leads, like, say, Maisie in MotOE or the clean-up gang in Flatline); every story needs them, unless you’re writing about the last person on Earth and you *mean* it. The failure in the case of Danny is surprising, since NuWho (at least) has a history of giving even background figures like these moments in which they get to exhibit more unusual complexity of character: look at Grouchy Old Fart in Flatline, for example, saying a real thank you at the end — not what we’d expect from him; or Rigsy, a sweet-natured arty kid cleaning up a youthful error, who suddenly reveals a streak of heroism, however unconsidered, by to die ramming the oncoming train.
But with Danny — they seem to have gone out of their way to *deprive* him of that extra depth, by making him an orphan, for starters. That meant no coffee with a big sister, say, to whom he could try to talk about Clara but find the subject too touchy. They made him a soldier, but then deprived him of even a phone call from an old army mate. He was built to fail, which became all the more striking because the actor’s presentation was full of the kind of warmth and kindness that attracts people — that guy would never have been a loner without friends, PTSD or not. It made me angry because of the waste, and the way the poor writing of that character hurt the stories he was in. I’ve thought about it a lot, because it was such a glaring error. Think of how much more wrenching his final gesture would have been if we’d been given enough about him to really care *before* he got to the Nethersphere!
I hope the writers have recognized their failure with him, and learned from it. They’re so good at providing that little spark of extra interest to minor figures (again, Flatline — the engine driver, “I always wanted to ram something!”) that not bothering to do that with some one as important to the story as Danny was — a mistake, to say the least.
2 May 2015 at 07:06 #39752@gamergirlavatar — India!! Tenerife!! What next, Iceland? All this globe-trotting is new-ish, isn’t it? The Beeb must have loosened the purse strings significantly. The upside is — exotic backgrounds probably means *more alien settings* in S9. Great! I’m ready.
Meantime I sulkily entertain myself with trying to work out a story that starts like this: “The Ring of Bleble and the bad-tempered Schism walk into a bar . . . ”
I’m still not clear on why MixMaster put Clara and the Doctor together in the first place, and seemed so pleased with whatever happened to them . . . is it enough to suppose that she meant all along for Clara to get such a grip on him that he would, indeed, “go to Hell if she asked” him to — since that’s (metaphorically) what they did in Dark Water, ending up in the Nethersphere and in MixMaster’s clutches (and v.v.)? Seems an awfully long stretch, to me, in terms of plans . . . I’m hoping there’s more to it, to be revealed in S9 of course.
21 April 2015 at 01:08 #39660@Schmitty91B “Cross”? “Irritable” “grumpy” “grouchy” “tetchy” — lots; too many, probably. We used to say someone who was grouchy was “a crosspatch” but I haven’t heard that word in years, and I may never have heard it outside my own family.
Here’s something rather charming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBmiG64tNLw
My favorite bit: “Dad, be *imaginative!*”
20 April 2015 at 18:25 #39653@purofilion Oh, yes, that casserole thing got old after a while, but they didn’t push it very hard, thank gods.
I just noticed — the”Script Editor” on the first two series of “Vera” is listed as “Elaine Collins”. That’s Capaldi’s wife, isn’t it — I read somewhere that she’s an actor who works on the production end of things too.
20 April 2015 at 06:03 #39648@lisa — Well, the tree thingies might have persuaded Anabel to join them so that she could help them tune their broadcast “ideas” better to Maebh, the more receptive sister. Maebh, in her broadcast to the world, doesn’t ask the tree thing to return her sister, but asks her sister to come home, which her sister does. Maebh is certainly “special”, but a bit too young when we see her to join the Doctor on any traveling basis — what about her mom, her sister? But maybe we’ll meet her again, as a young adult, and more free to strike out on her own as she pleases.
I don’t see a “Missy” link, but you could be right about that after all.
19 April 2015 at 17:57 #39633@purofilion Oh, yes, thanks! I am slowly working my way through MM, partly for the scenery, partly for the weirdly stylized stories and the rather massive body count (who will die how this time?). It has its charms, but a little goes a long way — and there’s such a *lot* of it! I did come across that episode, and liked it. But that must be about the third time (so far — I’m only into S6) they’ve used the “villages in friendly competition but to the death(s)” set-up. The whole thing is like a compendium of all the ways you can use different plot elements with the “cozy English village mystery” template.
And what beautiful villages! But of course that’s the point, isn’t it — beautiful, idyllic looking places, full of evil, scheming, mostly middle-to-upper class people; what could be more delicious? Though I imagine that to afford those places now, you’ve got to be downright rich, which tends to mean also duller in that it’s so homogenous (the working class people who service the place live well outside the pretty bits, most likely, as with our US pretty enclaves of wealth).
Oh, on that front, I saw a BBC announcement that “Vera”, that series set in Newcastle with a sort of female Columbo, has been signed up for two more seasons — lovely! Best outdoor cinematography I’ve seen in forever, in the first two series, so I hope they’ve got their same camera and production crew. That show was a stand-out for me in ways that none of the others I’ve sampled have been, and I hope the renewed series maintain the originals’ quality.
Also watching “Dalziel & Pascoe”. I loved Reginald Hill’s books, even at their most baroque, and sometimes the twisty stories get away from the TV writers, a bit, but I still like them. Warren Clarke was a magnificently homely actor, not really fat enough for them to keep referring to him as “the fat man” and “fat Andy” (and besides, the suits!), but really with that mug on him, all he really needed to do to maintain the character was remember to scratch his belly or groin now and then, in an absent-minded way.
19 April 2015 at 17:36 #39632Are we sure that the Nethersphere *has* died? Last word that I recall is CyberDanny (or maybe the original stored Danny, before he or a copy of him was downloaded into the armor for DiH) telling Clara that the Nethersphere “is dying”, at the time that the Afghan boy is returned to earth — or, a download of his mind in a cloned body? What is he, anyway? And what are the ethics of sending a possible downloaded clone-y copy of a dead boy back to his family some years after the real boy died? Or keeping him, for that matter?
Can you imagine the paperwork?
19 April 2015 at 04:37 #3962818 April 2015 at 08:41 #3962418 April 2015 at 06:44 #39622@lisa I generally draw a blank when it comes to River Song, mainly because she was so time-hoppy that I could never figure out what the hell she was doing or trying to do — so I sort of stopped paying attention. I recall her as pleasingly bold and tough, and I should have liked her — strong feminist overtones, and I liked her parents — but I just couldn’t hold the character together in my head long enough to form a liking for her. Maybe I’ll get another chance, if they bring her back and not go popping her all over the place like a cork (I had that problem with Clara too, prior to S8). Too much timey-wimey can sap character pretty badly, at least for me, because it tends to be confusing about motivation maybe.
What’s CAL, where she’s supposed to be stuck? Somehow I thought she’d died — ? Or did she just vanish “for good” into some timey-wimy anomaly? Old brain here, needs a bit of a leg up.
18 April 2015 at 06:34 #39621@janetteb Yes, I *do* complain about Danny’s shallowness; I think if was a huge waste to leave him as pretty much nothing but, er, “top layer”, as it were, when it would have taken so little to give him some reality-weight in the story. That was an authorial mistake, and I think it cost them later, in terms of viewers being able to credit Clara’s attraction to him. His shallowness made her falling in love with him look like shallowness too — manipulation for the sake of what he represented rather than what he might have been had his obvious personal warmth been given some play a few supporting scenes — just glimpses would have been enough. But instead we got the clockwork boyfriend; too bad!
For him to be given some character now would mean bringing him back from the very very dead, as in exploded in a sort of fire-canopy high in the sky: like, cinders, if that. People have pointed out that bringing him back after such a grand and generous gesture — saving Clara, and the rest of us too — would cheapen that very act and reduce it to a bad melodramatic joke. I can’t help but agree. They threw the poor bastard to the wolves, and bringing him back would only make things worse. Not to mention a revived him now being completely superfluous to the Clara + Doctor relationship, bc of Old Clara’s having got past the grieving and gone on to a pretty good life of her own, and those memories coming back with Young Clara so that she could blithely run off with the Doc at the end of Last Xmas. Moffat is brilliant, and could find a way to do it — but I don’t think that the character development as it stood at the end of Xmas could work with that to make a good story.
I looked at the bits of the aftermath of the hit and run again, and noted that this was not a hit-and-run incident; it was a hit-and-stay-for-the-consequences, since the car was halted right in front of his body, and none of the police were grabbing witnesses to ask about the homicidal vehicle — since it was still sitting there, presumably with its driver taken away to hospital to be checked out (for injuries, drugs/alcohol, etc.), although we don’t get to see that person at all. It’s such a — sorry — pedestrian sort an accident that I really doubt very much that Missy was involved in staging it, though of course there could be surprises (always). And I doubt that Danny left an estate of much significance — an orphan, he’s inherited nothing himself, and neither soldiers’ pay nor teachers’ pay leaves much to save up.
His only legacy is that everyone is still alive and Missy’s cybermen are gone; and that little boy returned to life with Missy’s bracelet. I do hope they don’t just drop that character! Too many got left by the wayside — Journey Blue, Perkins (though that was the character’s choice, if not the actor’s), Rigsy (*great* possible companion, IMO! Think of the wonder, think of the joy, to expand the horizons of a young man like that, and with talent of his own, too!), Psi and Saibra (very science fiction), Courtney (though I’m more partial to Rigsy, in quite young companion material) — lots to choose from! But — probably Maisie Williams as someone entirely new . . . Okay; but . . . ah, bah. This is why I don’t *read* much SF any more; always wanting to fix it my way.
Which reminds me — people object to Danny and the Brig maintaining enough “self” as cybermen to defy MissMaster, but aren’t her cybermen different from the old form of Cybermen? She says their minds have been “downloaded” into their suits, along with their skeletons, meaning an electronic transfer of — brain waves? — plus a physical transfer of bone. I thought the old Cybermen were made differently, which is how come MissMaster is so smug and pleased with herself over making “cybermen from cyberspace!” rather than — ? A new process invented by her (and maybe Dr. Chang or Dr. Sarkosa) perhaps being a way to excuse some kinks and fault that let people with strong trained-in discipline (in this case, military men) secretly retain some autonomy?
Oh, that’s just bonkers, isn’t it . . .
14 April 2015 at 01:49 #39580@spider — Well, you (and our eternal sidekick, Autocorrect) have definitely made my evening with a “Laser bean” scanning the area . . . Ah, the image . . . When not filled with rage and dread for various and sundry excellent reasons, I do love living in the modern era! Who knew that new tech would be the source of so much verbal slapstick? Besides the people who developed it all, of course.
13 April 2015 at 18:27 #39577@jimthefish I found the Time Lords on Gallifrey utterly ridiculous, frankly, and forgot them as quickly as I could; I hope they stay gone for a loooooong time. Bunch of pompous, puffed-up popinjays! Of course the Doctor took off, makes perfect sense. I’ve always had a problem wondering why the heck he wants so badly to go back, the rest of the universe being so much more varied and interesting. But then, I escaped Manhattan (and the US) as soon as I could, and seriously considered taking a private teaching contract in Africa after two years with the Peace Corps there, as the start of the life of an itinerant expat, like some I’d met on the job — a bit like Old Clara’s post-Doctor life, in fact (but, family). So I’m just weird, I guess.
I’d much rather see the Doctor head off to try to “fix” some past mistakes (or at least check the later consequences of those mistakes and ameliorate problems he caused if he can) in other parts of the universe, rather than looking for Gallifrey, and a family that a) might well be all dead, and b) he rarely mentions and seems hardly to think about at all . . . ?
@papermoon Yes, I agree; I realize, re-watching, that what gave me the impression that Smith was all flirty fluff was the whirling dervish aspect of his Doctor — he sometimes seems to be almost jitterbugging through a scene, but with more flailing around, particularly when he’s in the Tardis and doing/plannning stuff. And he often said his lines so fast, over music that was overbearing, that I had trouble understanding what he had to say. The impression of giddy youth got in the way of my being able to get the quieter, more intense moments, I think.
I prefer the comparative stillness and containment of Capaldi. It suggests a more mature and experienced Doctor, and implies a perpetual whirlwind of activity inside the mind. When he moves, it’s usually a focused and purposeful response to the demands of the moment, rather than a generalized style of wildly shedding extra energy, per Smith. Interesting difference in these two actors’ decisions about how the character presents physically, and a great way to immediately differentiate these two Doctors, apart from face and costume.
13 April 2015 at 08:02 #39569Fortitude’s done, and I’m annoyed to find that I guessed way to early who really killed that Pettigrew person and why, and meanwhile it looks as if there’s a second season planned, and why people kept going crazy and killing each other (all in exactly the same way, very peculiar). Wanted surprises, got — no surprises. And torture, too, of course. Damn it. I liked it better when the filler material was your trusty old car chase (they could have used snow-mobiles).
Anybody see GOT tonight? Snip, snap, quick little scenes all over the map, two lads in a bed, and wind up with a mercy killing, so off we go again; gorgeous to look at, of course. And then #2 of “Wolf Hall”, which I was surprised to find rather slow. Reading the book, I was yanked in and drawn under by the incredible flood of sensory detail that just overwhelmed the boring old present I was sitting there reading in, but of course that kind of super-rich rush is gone when you do a screen version. My mind wanders; I wonder how many pounds of clothes Cromwell is lugging about on what looks to be a rather sleight frame. At least he got to crack a smile, sing a bit of an Italian ditty, and hit a bull’s eye this time.
13 April 2015 at 07:47 #39568They’re running DW on BBCA, mixing up episodes from SmithDoc’s era in what seems to be a random order — I caught “Let’s Kill Hitler” followed by “The Girl Who Waited”, and before that something else that I can’t remember the name of, but it was little River being kidnapped by a mean lady in an eyepatch. More tomorrow — it’s every night for a few hours/episodes, I think. All that time-jumping plus multiple versions of people was hard enough for me to follow the first time round (I remember seeing every one of these stories now), and I still can’t sort out what comes before what. I obviously can’t call myself a Whovian; am down with it.
I’m liking Smith better than I recall, and Amy too . . . There’s a lot more “I hate myself” on the Doctor’s part than I’d have thought. I’ve seen a lot of fannish complaints that while Season 8 promised (and delivered) a “dark” Doctor, there was plenty of darkness about SmithDoc as well, and that’s certainly shown up tonight.
12 April 2015 at 02:01 #39547@bluesqueakpip Quite right; that is a failing of mine — falling into the comfortable illusion of being back at college, bullshitting about Big Stuff without a lot of forethought behind one’s statements — so apologies, and I’ll try to avoid that in future. Here’s what I should have said:
“For many people, myself included, nobody’s been able to reconcile the “good” God with the suffering of everything but rocks.”
Your comment:”The ‘problem of evil’ for many religions is that you can have all the philosophical/theological explanations in the world, but they won’t help you comfort two kids under ten who’ve just lost their mother to cancer.”
In a nutshell. I think that’s the problem for everybody, and some people find a solution to it — or at least some help in living with it — in religion; some don’t, but that doesn’t mean they stop looking so not being “religious” doesn’t necessarily mean “atheist”. Which reminds me: what, if anything, do you think distinguishes atheism from materialism?
I do think it’s part of the “fixing” of messes — the discharge of karmic debts — to deliberately take on difficult lifetimes chosen to deepen one’s understanding and empathy. In fact, I don’t think Karmic payback actually “takes” unless it involves this expansion of empathy and understanding (on the part of both creditor and debtor), all tempering traveling souls toward greater and greater understanding and compassion, for both self and others. However, the unpredictability of my choices colliding with those of others, or with the laws of physics working themselves out, means that there’s no knowing whether a person’s misfortunes are self-chosen for karmic or other reasons, or truly accidental. So the default response is, IMO, compassion, though sometimes it is not easy to come up with.
11 April 2015 at 02:39 #39512@lisa — just came across some interview remarks with Steven Moffatt. According to him, the Doctor is not a hero; he’s “a man who sometimes acts as a hero”, so that seems to be his definition.
On the other hand, in the same interview SM says that part of the Doctor’s non-hero identity is that he doesn’t go *looking for trouble*, which is, apparently, what he thinks heroes (and super-heroes, by extension) do. So for him, the Doctor is just sort of touring around the universe sightseeing (?) and lo, trouble somehow always finds him? A likely story! Though you could assume, I guess, that we don’t get to *see* the travels that don’t turn into “a thing” because, where’s the entertaining adventure?
So, seems to me that thinking of the Doctor as a hero is as good as any other way of thinking about him, never mind what anybody says!
@@@@ Hi, Ed. I don’t watch BG Who — there are only so many hours in the day these days — so I’m afraid I don’t have an answer, but somebody else here might.
9 April 2015 at 09:38 #39501@purofilion Well, that’s me paying it forward, for help given to me in the past. I’ve been lucky, and am lucky enough still to be able to be in a position to do that.
Beware anyone, *anyone*, who claims to “be spiritual”. Those usually turn out to be egomaniacs with a taste for gathering a personal cult of — admirers? Followers? Worshipers? I have to keep coming back to Zen ideas here — those who speak don’t know; those who know don’t speak — presumably because they don’t have to. Their presence and their actions spell out their authenticity to others who are capable of getting the message. Words, poor things, beautiful and pleasing as they are, really are cheap. All they cost is a breath or a few taps on the keyboard, at least as long as you live in what passes for a free country these days.
All those frauds and phonies of the sixties and onward — hot air. Literally, here in the Southwest; ambitious white men and women hijacked their own versions of Native American spirituality, claimed to be part Indian, and sold chants and dances and sweat-lodge sessions to other whites as routes to “spiritual cleansing and power”.
Regenerating forever — that would be something to see — snap, snap, snap — he’d die of sheer exhaustion, I think, or simply combust. it was an empty, imaginative threat, playful, even. He’s a bit manic in KtM, isn’t he? I think his real super-power is his mastery of the art of improvisation. “Do something clever — !” He does, all the time, and expects his companions to be able to keep up. It’s the power to clear your feelings so your brain can see into the crux of the matter and find an immediate response that *might* work, and then the sheer nerve to go ahead with it, risk and all. His enemies don’t have to see weapons or brawn or all that testosterone rage of the Hulk and his ilk to be scared off: they just have to recognize that this is that guy who finds finds a way and brings it, whatever the risk, on sheer energy and (you should pardon the expression) brass balls.
Super hero, I don’t know; hero? Often. Naturally, he doesn’t claim to be one.
Whoo. Bed now; it’s 2:30 a.m. here!
sleepy ichi
9 April 2015 at 06:21 #39497@mrpastaguy — funny, a cousin of mine just sent me this link in an email — maybe you know the clip?
9 April 2015 at 06:19 #39496@mrpastaguy — I like your upbeat energy, and it’s got a catchy structure — good for you!
9 April 2015 at 06:12 #39495@ godsakes, no need to apologize — you’re supposed to jump in! I’d agree that in Earth terms, he could be seen as a super-hero for having those abilities, but the avoidance of violence marks him as a wholly different kind of hero, to me; also because his deeds he’s maybe more a hero for what he does and what he’s done (the whole Trenzalore story, driving away the Big Eye thing with mere threats without a punch thrown, etc.) than for what he *is*, and that’s a smart, brave, even reckless adventurer desperately on the run from boredom, banality, and (at various points) his own guilt. Aren’t superheroes more like amped up crime fighters? The Doctor does that too, sometimes; but I see him more as a problem solver, and that just doesn’t read as “superhero” to me.
Anti-heroes, though — aren’t they characters with dark sides, even criminal aspects, who when push comes to shove will somehow break out of their cynical shells and save the day, usually with crude violence? I can’t think of an example, though. I do think, though, that it’s more extreme than just being non-traditional. Oh, how about Constantine, the demon-killer character from comics and a recent tv series? On the surface he’s mean and cynical and doesn’t give a damn, but at crunch time sure enough, he comes through. Well then, maybe CapDoc does qualify — at least, a lot of viewers were dismayed by what they saw as his “mean” nature in Series 8. ??
9 April 2015 at 05:56 #39494@mrpastaguy Clara is my favorite companion (did I post about this already? Apologies if I did, cuz here goes). She grew out of being a plot device and became a willful and passionate individual with her own goals, however imperfect they were (no way could she have settled down with Danny — that ship had sailed already). She’ll die thinking, “I did it — all of it that I could”, not “Oh no, not yet!” And she’s not afraid to challenge a Time Lord and go to the mat with him (uh, the Matt?) if she thinks she’s right and he’s wrong or just completely missing the point. That challenge is exactly what he needs to keep him aware of more than his own busy, spinning brain and inclinations. I see them as a brilliant pair, their dance a tango (with some aggression on both sides), their doom the same damn doom as everybody else’s — eventually, “Everything changes”.
9 April 2015 at 05:44 #39493@purofilion Um, the “f**ker” in question is the shooter, not the shot, as you can see (if you can stand to watch) right bloody damn here:
And yes, in my view the cop owes the dead guy big time: eight shots in the back of an unarmed man who’s running away, and then you drop your taser next to him so you can claim that he “grabbed it” so of course you had to shoot him, when he was already some yards away from you but somehow “threatening” your racist ass by being black while running for his life. That dead man’s entire adult lifetime of choices was just stamped out for no reason but the lazy malice of a white man with a badge and a gun, as I think a trial will show if it’s allowed to.
Meanwhile, redemption from what? All most of us do, apart from the malice shown above, is serve our bodies’ natural drives to survive, which it communicates by means of fear and the hormonal reactions of fear. How can you be “redeemed” from the natural urges of your lizard-brained body? If you fail an override from your higher self, your soul, well, you try harder next time. The only sane response to that is compassion, since we’re all in the same boat there. Malice is going the extra miles in the wrong direction, and for that you pay, to get the full impact of your deed.
As for forgiveness, that’s a decision to be made by the victim (in this case, the dead man) when lifetimes are reviewed once they’re over, by those who lived them. A Karmic debt can be forgiven, but not by some outside authority — by the person to whom the debt is owed. Very advanced souls sometimes do this on the spot as they die (as I believe Gandhi did, re his assassin, before expiring). You pay your debts, your debts are cleared. There’s nothing to redeem, and, as I see it, nothing that anyone *else* can do to clear your debts: that’s your job, and sooner or later, you do it. I think that’s partly about completing the experience, for both parties. The victim takes the role of killer, and gets to understand him; the killer becomes the victim, and gets *that* side of the experience of murder. I think it’s the dawn of mutual understanding that makes forgiveness, or cancellation of the debt, even possible.
Studies keep cropping up of infant idealism, and so far as I know, the results are pretty consistent: infants will spontaneously share, spontaneously commiserate, and spontaneously comfort each other, because that *is* our natural bent — until fear enters the picture. We know from the beginning that all of us deserve kindness from each other. Our cultures do their best to cancel that awareness, or at least channel it so that the designated inferior (say, an unarmed black man) is excluded from the category of people who deserve our kindness just by being people. Fear divides us and pits us against each other, if we let it. When you’ve lived enough lives, I think you come to a place where you no longer let the fear drive you, because you see where it’s all coming from. I believe that even malicious acts like this cop’s come, if you look deeply enough, from fear. Understanding that, the creditor may accept remorse, repentance, and forgive on that basis. But I think it takes a lot of experience with paying what you owe and collecting what’s owed you before that happens.
As to where the Karmic system comes from, who set it up, don’t know, don’t much care. Some Asian philosophies ignore the God thing and skip right to symbolic accounts of energy sorting itself into different forms and from that difference emerges physical creation, which makes sense to me — the whole shebang is just energy, thin, thick, flowing, knotted up more or less tightly (Rocks? Water? “Etheric” gases? Sound waves?). I favor that position: there’s no way to observe or “prove” anything, so why waste time on it? I don’t have to know who designed my and built my car; it’s enough for me that it gets me from here to there. I guess I flunk as a mystic <ggg>. I like things that work, no higher being necessary. I just (!) need to learn to respect and care for the body, but not let it run my behavior for its own hind-brain purposes (me! me! me forever, me myself at any cost to anybody cuz if I die, I’m just dead!). Well, I’m an author, used to making something out of nothing, and completely de-glamorized when it comes to omnipotent power (which is what I become when I write a story).
Small scale kindnesses? Exactly. I can’t fix the world, but a friend who got fired from a crap job that was killing her and who has other skills but no money has a loan from me as of two days ago, seed money for her own small business, because why not? I can help (no tax bill this year, because of big deductible expenses re my husband’s dementia facility), so I help because on this scale, I actually *can* help, in a very practical way. I know she’ll pay it forward, and if not, not; it’s her life.
I’m saying that “conscience” comes in the package from the get-go, even if you’re just starting out on your first lifetime: it’s wired into us. The culture preserves itself by distorting or suppressing that innate kindness (it’s the instinct of empathy). That’s why after a while, we learn to transcend the rules of culture where we can, person to person (try to do it on a large scale and you get the Shrub’s Iraq war — total failure and endless trouble).
Ah, yes, Angel, the Doctor, and vampirism — you have to wonder. “The love of a good woman”, though, to me that’s a cultural construct. What he needs is what we all need: love without fear, from/for anybody, doesn’t matter. That’s the cure for fear, and that’s why cultures are terrified of love and try to channel it away into something else — anything, anything but interpersonal interaction (and specifically love for an all-powerful imaginary being — my take on it — whether it’s Allah or Yaweh or the trinity). Culture controls by fear, because culture serves the body — it protects the bodies of those within it from threats perceived as coming from outside it (say, Muslims), and from enemies within (the hippies, the commies, the fascist conspiracies, the immigrants, etc.), and more so from the wild card, the wildest card there is, the card that melts away the us/them divide — love, compassion, empathy.
Yes, you can have that. We get glimpses. But it’s like Buddhist enlightenment: it’s a flash in the dark. Eventually, every companion leaves the Doctor, every lover dies and leaves the vampire trudging through her endless years. Stan Robinson’s Mars trilogy has Mars colonists whose lives are technologically extended for hundreds of years; eventually, one by one, they commit suicide. We live by fresh starts, maybe. In this, the Doctor has a huge advantage over Angel: regeneration. Clever boy.
9 April 2015 at 03:01 #39487@purofilion About good works: nothing, IMO, “saves” you, because there’s nothing to be saved from. I see the whole process as the education of each individual soul, including souls not embodied in the human species but in others as well, on this planet and other planets. All we are doing is progressing gradually through an enormous pageant of return from embodiment to soul-energy that flows back to the original source, the exhale of energy that starts creation by reversing itself, the way your heart takes in blood and pumps blood out again. inhaling js all back again to merge together into something you could call God except that it’s not about judgment. You return to the source by learning, not by being saved by somebody else. The whole “saving” thing never did make any sense to me, still doesn’t. You “save” yourself, and I think everybody does, sooner or later, because the next “inhale/exhale” of universal energy lies ahead. The Buddhists are right, I think, about that: many paths, all going to the same place.
Salvation from what, though? Bad stuff that I do, I do because my physical self feels , and fears, pain, loss, and death, all of which are inherent in physicality. What I need to overcome isn’t an evil appetite for “sin”. It’s fear, the body’s fears for itself. On the physical plane, I’m a physical being, with all of the options and conditions that that implies. Once I’ve taken it all in and understood that you don’t “fix” a universe with suffering inherent in its laws, I’m done here. My soul energy, I think, goes to other levels of existence where the rules are different because they don’t involve nerves that carry pain information, bodies that break down, the death and decay of physicality. People get glimpses of such levels when they master meditation, or maybe have a near-death experience, or take drugs like ayahuasca and LSD that make such glimpses possible; but we can’t live there with physical bodies. We’re not here to escape the physical experience; we come here to engage with it, learn from it, and move on. That’s my concept of what we’re doing. The closest thing, I guess, is the Hindu idea of life as a dance, existing for its own sake: art, if you like; an art through which the infinite can perceive itself, and for which Karmic exchanges provide shape — the “plot”, if you like, of the story.
Sorry for rambling, and I’m perfectly content to stop right here forever if I’m being a pain about it. I just get itchy when feel that the alternative constructions of these matters are being seen to narrowly for the wild multiplicity of the reality, assuming there is such a thing, beneath our religious conceptions and theories, Abrahamic or otherwise. That’s exactly why I think so many western people now are turning toward spirituality outside of the structures of formal religion (souls, but not God or gods, in my case). They’ve caught the scent of much wider, more open, less judgmental spaces.
And or, I’ve had just a bit more wine than I meant to with my chicken tonight, and have blathered on for far too long about non-demonstrable things . . .
9 April 2015 at 02:18 #39486@bluesqueakpip Of course it’s not a new objection. This here is the great big “problem of evil” thing, and I’m not setting up for a big argument about it — what for? Nobody’s been able to reconcile the “good” God with the suffering of everything but rocks (and who really knows about that), and I don’t expect to here. Just explaining myself; pay it no mind. Life’s too short . . .
But let me point out a difference between your statement about reincarnation and where I’ve ended up (so far). I’d not, as I said, a Buddhist. I do believe in Karma, but not Buddhist Karma, that can get you demoted by some supreme bookkeeper to a bunch of roach lives for bad behavior. I think that we create our own Karma because we are our own bookkeepers; and it’s not as easy as all that to earn Karma, good *or* bad (stepping on an ant won’t turn you into a roach next time, unless you decide, between lives, that yeah, stepping on an ant deserves a roach life). The primacy of choice is crucial, because by choice and its consequence we learn. IMO, if you reincarnate then you can learn, between lives, all the lessons (including the ones not evident while still doing the life) surrounding your bad (or good) deeds in the life just concluded, including that you’ve done Karmic crap to somebody. My definition of earning bad Karma is doing something, (intentionally and not by accident or because someone evil held a gun to your head and said do that to X or I’ll blow out X’s brains and then yours), that cancels the learning path of another person’s life. You are canceling their choices = their lessons on their path to — let’s call it enlightenment. Bad stuff happens; what counts is what you do about it, and what comes of what you do.
The only effect this has on your next life is that you (meaning your soul between lives, which has an overview your this-life personality does not) and the other person involved agree that there’s a Karmic debt owed, and you design your next life to make it possible to repay the debt (or maybe a life three lives down the line — choice makes things flexible). If, say, you shoot down someone in cold blood like that f**ker in South Carolina yesterday, yes, you owe him. Becoming a roach doesn’t cut it. You set up a situation in which you pay that reincarnated person, and that reincarnated person chooses the form of the repayment. It’s more like physics or chemistry than religion: you deliberately kicked something basic out of balance. You have to fix your mess before you can get through you incarnations and get the hell out of here for good, no matter how long that takes. It’s justice without an outside judge, soul to soul.
If over half the world accepts the monstrous God, fine; I’ve never believed that majority always = right, far from it. I think a good deal of the world, notably in the West, is outgrowing the whole God thing, and I wish them the best of luck with that, because I do not expect it to be a painless process. I see getting past God as a phase of growth that has already gained a lot of traction because it’s our natural next step: responsibility.
Personally, I don’t believe that suffering can ever be abolished from the physical plane: it’s built in, as the necessary constant shifting of energy, often by X catching, killing, and eating Y, repeat repeat repeat, plus the “accidents” of universal laws (math, chemistry, et al). Pain is inherent in physicality, IMO. That’s why we pass through here — to learn that and the compassion that comes with it — but we don’t stay. The idea of God is simply unavoidable, given our human (and usually very fruitful) mind-set of causality and of finding of patterns everywhere, because of the way that our perceptions work.
8 April 2015 at 06:44 #39476Naw, it’s pretty far-fetched, this “he’s the Devil” thing, but somebody had some fun making the case! It’s amazing what gets projected onto what started as a goofy little show about a crazy alien gramps in a junkyard 50 yrs ago — though now it’s a big show, polished and, below obvious surface levels, quite sophisticated, although still a bit goofy now and then (the dinosaur in “Deep Breath” really was way too huge, and would have become a big problem when it got hungry . . . ).
I don’t know about the super-hero thing, though. In the DW comics, he’s drawn like a super-hero, all exaggerated action and excited dialog. But on TV at least, the Doctor’s only “super-powers”, so far as I can see, are biological enhancements — a very sharp mind stocked with experience over a very long life; an extra heart; and the ability to die into instant reincarnation as an adult because his cells reshape him in an instant in a massive discharge of energy. The rest is detachable add-ons: sonic screwdriver, Tardis, and huge memory (the memory sometimes semi-detaches itself by becoming limited by “gray areas” of non-memory when a story demands this). Oh, and there’s some degree of telepathy, isn’t there? But it seems to be very patchy and unreliable (in fact I can’t remember any incidents of its being a crucial aspect of a DW story).
How does that compare to, say, being able to fly, repel bullets with your skin, climb buildings with spider silk, run incredibly fast or turn things to ice or fire with a touch or a thought, like other superheroes that come to mind? Though maybe Batman . . . who has no “magic” that I know of, does use nifty tools like the Batmobile, and in recent years has become very “dark”, in some ways an anti-hero, the way the Doctor can be on a really bad day . . . The major similarity, I think, is that the Doctor takes on dangerous situations much as super-heroes do, but the main difference is that he hardly ever uses physical force to solve those problems. Super-heroes swing their fists and throw bad guys around, which the Doctor almost never does.
Maybe that’s because he’s a super-hero from Gallifrey, not a transformed Earth person? A whole different approach; different enough to make him something other, or more, or less than a super-hero?
8 April 2015 at 03:24 #39473@lisa The Doctor tries to do good, although sometimes he falls off the wagon into a vengefulness that can be pretty harsh for a show with a “family” viewership (Family of Blood, etc.). I came across a very odd discussion on reddit about how the scripts hide clues that the Doctor was — the Devil, or at least demonically evil, in the past, but has reformed by taking the name “The Doctor” as a sign of his promise to heal instead of hurting. Anybody else see this?
http://www.reddit.com/r/doctorwho/comments/1eq0lm/thematic_allusions_between_the_doctor_and_the/
8 April 2015 at 01:40 #39472@bluesqueakpip Fine, glad to hear it! One universe at a time is all I can handle, and probably all there *can* be — doesn’t “universe” mean it’s a unique thing, only one of it? Jeez. Seems as if some people want to ride a dozen horses at once instead of one . . . “multiverse” seems like fanciful overreach to me; but then so much of science does.
7 April 2015 at 17:21 #39468@jimthefish — I have no patience for boring, one-note zombies either, with their comical “Brains!” refrain and absolutely baseless (as usually written) brutish aggression. That’s why iZombie seems so fresh — this girl is a dead *person*, with personal concerns only with a twist to the lens; and briefly taking on characteristics of dead people she noshes on gives the show some intriguing zip as well. How long it will hold up, I wouldn’t predict, but I’m liking it so far.
I keep checking in on Grimm, and I keep changing the channel, every time. Flat characters is certainly a huge part of the problem for me; these people just bore me, with their endless sub-rosa politicking and threatening and posturing. I just can’t get hooked, even though I’d certainly like to — more to watch!
7 April 2015 at 05:41 #39464@purofilion Oh, believe me, I do not look forward to more lives here. I’m nearly dumbstruck when religious people respond with, “Oh, you’re just taking the easy way out, trying to avoid judgment etc.” Easy way out, my elbow. Anybody here want to be an adolescent again? I’ve met reincarnationists who think there are “shortcuts” to avoid more lifetimes, but I think *they* are making up an easy way out so they can take it.
I’m not a real Buddhist; there are many varieties of Buddhism, as of every other system, and some include mobs of demons that only a monk or priest can deal with (for a fee, maybe); or reincarnation as other animals (a waste of time, IMO, since I already inhabit an animal — my body — so those lessons are part of what I’m getting anyway). I am talking about reincarnation as process, not a religious system. I can’t prove the system is real, any more than anybody can prove any belief systems real that aren’t based on some type of “hard” evidence. Call me one of those “SBNR” people you read about in the news; organized religions leave me cold. Finding my own way pleases and satisfies me, probably because my natural inclination (in this life, mind <grin>) is to ask questions, not to grab answers. That’s how I write, how I think, and (I hope) how I live. Reincarnation-as-process is a highly provisional perceptual grid that I’ve cobbled up for myself for looking at big questions; that’s all.
I like your Angel quotes. If God is real, it’s essential to try to live a decent life to not disappoint Him. If God is not real, you try to live a decent life as a responsibility to self and society. But in both cases, there can be these bitter divisions that you allude to — only more so, in my view, when morality is codified under different labels, like Christianity and Islam. So I prefer the private route, as you say, and if my private grid ever does become both publicly significant and codified under a label, I’ll probably go off looking for something else before the stupid doctrinal wars start.
People of faith, in my view, have chosen in this life to do the “faith and its consequences” unit, which I think we do over many times, and not always in order. I’m doing the “skepticism and its consequences” unit, also not for the first or last time. I think we all do them all.
As for the Doctor, as a story told in our reality the Doctor is a prayer: “Please, somebody, send us a brave, clever defender with magical powers who will see the justice of our cause and help when we’re on our beam ends and drowning.” The prayer goes unanswered: there is no Doctor in reality (so far as we know). In his fictional universe, he himself knows of no God. As you say, he’s a bit like what God ought to be (a bit — he’s not all-powerful or even all-seeing on account of the “gray areas” and, well, the “idiot” part). But he’s also like us, with an alien edge so he’s not like us *only*; he’s also like the Ood, the creatures from “Time Heist”, the space whales, and all the sapient species out there. If there is a God hidden in the Whoniverse, the Doctor could be a very rough and clumsy avatar. If there isn’t, he could be the Whoniverse simply including such a helper in itself for balance in an equation in some universal math beyond math.
I agree on NuWho — it was like a sudden lurch forward in maturity for the Doctor, which is really what brought me back to the show. And no, as a species I don’t think we’re ready to lose our training wheels.
7 April 2015 at 02:22 #39462@purofilion I do get the idea that we’re meant to grow our own consciences and capabilities and virtue, and in fact that is what I think reincarnation, as I’ve come to see the idea, is about, only more effectively because learning occurs throughout many lifetimes and eventually leads to all of those developments. Then you either graduate back to the non-physical — to continue your “education” there? Maybe — or you choose to stick around on the physical for a while, acting as an enlightened role model for others to learn from, before you move off the physical for good. I’m working off part of the Buddhist model here, I think, which is about process rather than Godhood.
I think that dispenses with the God problem (the problem of evil) by dispensing with God, for whose existence there is (to me) not convincing evidence anyway. The problem of evil becomes the problem of choice in collision with other choices + the laws of physics etc. Nobody *made it* bad; it’s just a really crazy-harsh environment for beings of pure spirit embodied in physical bodies.
You’re still left with the First Cause problem (so who made the laws of science and our spirits?), but frankly I don’t need an answer to that in order to get on with dealing with the physical while I’m here in the middle of it, which is what I’ve come here to do. My questions stop there; I have what I need, and the rest can wait for whatever (if anything) death brings. Well; for me it *must* wait, unless convincing proof of something else arrives before I kick the bucket.
Assuming we want to go on with this bit, I think we have to move this stuff over there to the sofa too, right? Craig? Cut and paste, or what?
7 April 2015 at 01:57 #39460Oh, and I don’t *have* any maths, so my ideas are just that, ideas and I can only get so far with them, so I prefer the notion of a field of potential near-futures and increasingly broad and indistinct farther futures potentially growing from them, so when you choose A rather than H, instead of creating two separate time streams, ad infnitum, A is actualized into being, but H fades away to nothingness, as with everything — choice matters because choosing for A means choosing against the rest of the alphabet of potential for that particular choice. Another way of saying, maybe, that multiple universes just don’t do it for me. The idea feels arbitrarily over-complicated, though a useful device for story makers.
7 April 2015 at 01:51 #39459@bluesqueakpip Yep, I agree, the show assumes a fixed-but-only-sometimes river of time, with fixed points as a sort of patch that kinda works.
So given the show’s assumptions about fixed past and fixed future, agree with your points on that problem — there’s got to be an awful lot of gray area to cover all that otherwise-knowledge about both past and future. It’s getting worse, of course, with each complication-by-time travel, and good luck to them with that!
On the interruption of natural events/disasters: yes, definitely yes; I didn’t address that before, because — agh, complicated! Headsteam! And I’ve already got allergies . . . Gotta go a little deeper, then. For me, we are all individual souls, each one incarnating in a succession of lives for the purpose of learning what physicality is — and the physical plane is the only place that that experience is available (and yes, I’m assuming — or inferring, if you like — the existence of other planes that are not physical). What we learn is not only the consequences of our choices on the physical plane, but the consequences of our choices in collision and collaboration with all the other choices being made, plus the underlying progression of the laws of physics working themselves out on the physical plane of their application. Not only (IMO) is our activity not predetermined, but we incarnate in order to experience accidental events and how they intersect with our choices and the actions of ours that they lead to.
So physics/chemistry/math etc. *are* instruments of predetermination, but not of our choices, which are situational and responsive also to our individual ideas of and desires concerning that present and the future that grows from it. The laws of physics/chemistry/etc., acting as they must act on the physical universe, are the set; we, and all sentient beings that are also sapient (which I take to mean, equipped with time-binding thought and some sort of language to express it) are the actors. The drama that nourishes, entertains, and teaches us is the product of the interaction of these forces.
Oh, that’s funny! I’ve arrived at a version, more or less, of what the DW creative team uses — a flow of time and events that’s both fixed (laws of the sciences and their inevitable workings) and moveable (sentient choices, i.e. “free” will)! Plus — drama, nourishment, and maybe even learning! For some reason, that strikes me as — I feel like an idiot (*without* a box)! But I really do see reality that way, have done for decades. I don’t recommend it, mainly because it’s just as unprovable as the perceptual structure that I reject (God), so why pick this over that? One convinces me, the other doesn’t. Strokes and folks, as always . . .
7 April 2015 at 01:21 #39457@craig Yep, with you on the Zombie show — I quite like it! It’s so up-beat, without being utterly goofy, that it’s very pleasing — comic book fiction transcribed to the screen without the usual blow-hard shenanigans the put me right off.
@bluesqueakpip — Can’t agree, because our action now isn’t “fixed” in the past until the future happens and turns our present into past. I don’t see that because from an actualized future, looking back at us shows our present as fixed, that means that our present and immediate future (which we are in the process of making right now) are fixed *for us*, any more than the rest of the future between us and them is fixed for us. We in the present are not in the same position re present time as they in the future will be. Does not compute — but then again, I won’t really believe that time travel — including actions that interfere with time’s one-way, past-sealing arrow — is possible until some one does it and reports back with evidence. Reading a lot of SF, with different takes on this, has made me very skeptical on the subject.
For the Doctor, of course, I happily kick skepticism out the window and sit back to enjoy great fairy tales with “science”, and often logic too, cheerfully cut to fit.
As for the Doctor liking people, he clearly does all of the time for some people, some of the time for all people, I guess, and mixing into our affairs works if he’s got gray areas that protect him from knowing the outcome of his or others’ actions (assuming a fixed future that can still be knocked loose a bit here and there by a smart guy with a sonic). But God? Here we part company, I think. My response to a God giving a fig for people, let alone liking them, is pretty much the same as Stephen Fry’s answer: “Really? Cancer in little kids?” which is sufficient, for me, to stand for the whole problem of evil. I’m an atheist because by its actions, the God concept looks monstrous to me. If you have the power to do something about suffering — something that alleviates or removes it — and you don’t — how “good” are you?
One way I know that the Doctor is not God is that he does, in fact, make an effort, and even succeeds sometimes, at least in the short run, in alleviating suffering. That God engages is, to my mind, another of those unobservable inferences that religious people make. I’m not, and I don’t. I know there are masses of theoretical arguments over this, but for me none that I know of weighs a feather on the scales of suffering (of any and all sentient beings) as we have always known it and continue to know it. So I think we should agree to disagree.
If I knew how to do those smiley face things, I’d sprinkle them throughout as a symbol of “no rancor intended” in the above argument. The peaceful discourse in this space is too precious to disrupt, unless it’s to shout “Daleks coming!” and meaning it.
@purofilion Eh, thanks for the second; and I *would* feel better, if not for the fact that the blasted mulberry trees have gone apeshit on out city, choking the air with pollen and drowning many of us in our own sinus juices. I’m loaded with Claritin, which makes me dopey . . . A couple of weeks of this (which used to happen in May, by the way), and all will be better.
6 April 2015 at 22:24 #39451Bringing a reply here, to a post by @bluesqueakpip back on Open Thread TV shows, because this is speculation about time travel in general as well as DW specifically, so I think maybe this is a better venue?
The topic was the problem of The Doctor in a universe in which past and future are already fixed, by “fixed points” in time, throughout the entirety of the flow of time from end to end (assuming that means the beginning of our universe and its future ending): predestination’s constraints on voluntary action/inaction. Bluesqueakpip said (correct me if I’m wrong!) that being a time traveler, the Doctor would know who’s gonna get killed by the Daleks at any point in time and would be remiss if he didn’t use time travel to go save the victims, all of them, and also everybody else who’s an innocent in peril at pretty much any point in time. He’d be the ultimate janitor, zooming around fixing everybody’s messes before they had a chance to happen as messes, and that would give the universal time line fatal hiccups of contradictions, confusions, and unimaginable snarl-ups as a result of his activity.
Seems to me that knowing the future challenges coming his way and their outcomes (because he’s a Time Lord and has traveled extensively in the future) is not a problem for the Doctor if choice matters; and choice only matters if the future is not fixed. If, instead, the future is woven moment by moment by all of our choices at each moment, and all of the choices we’ve each made up til each moment. Which would mean, I think, that there is no “future” there for anyone to know or not know, only ranges of potentiality fanning out ahead from where we are in the present. The future is formed instant after instant by what we choose now, and only becomes fixed when it becomes the past.
Then what the Doctor visits when he travels forward would be one future pathway among many possible ones, perhaps the most likely one, but still, only a sort of phantasm that feels real to the Doctor, but immediately melts back into potentiality when he leaves. The future is potentiality for us to shape into reality moment by moment. The past is fixed (because we don’t have time travel), although our perceptions of the past shift and change continually, with historical discoveries, new historical theories and methods, changing theoretical lenses through which to look at the past, etc.
The show creates the predestination problem for itself by assuming that the future *is* already fixed (by fixed points in an otherwise flexible flow of events). Assume a future as yet unactualized, and the destinations of travel into that future that are really still only *possible* futures. Choice in the past is over; choices in the present make the actualized future out of an amorphous mass of potentiality. Predestination as a problem goes away; only the past is determined.
But then we get to wonder instead, why bother traveling into “the” future if there are multiple potential futures, so there’s no guarantee that anything you do in the one you arrive at will be part of what turns out to be the real, actualized future, rather than just a doodle in the margins or erased altogether? Why go to a possible future even just to observe, since what you see will be only a possibility? Traveling into a past that is already fossilized by “fixed points” or by choices already made is pretty problematic in itself, unless you only go as an observer to see what really happened. *Acting* in the past to alter already actualized outcomes leading to the present changes everything ahead, including the possibilities of being able, in the present, to choose that past point and go there to make a change. That’s the kind of loop of implications that keeps me from writing time travel stories.
Greg Benford’s “Timescape”, an old book but a good one, posits that major choice points in the present create alternative timelines in the future, each one real for the people in it. He has future scientists communicating with present ones to warn them of the dead end their future earth is rushing toward in time for a different set of choices to be made now, leading to survival — leaving the doomed alternative earth to travel on into an environmental apocalypse instead. Lots of SF uses this idea of alternative universes/worlds/timelines, as has Doctor Who. It’s re-admits the significance of choice in the present, since choice is what selects the branch of future time that your world will travel down, so what you do matters in terms of what happens afterwards.
Too complicated; head hurts; maybe too complex for a TV viewership that includes and is partly designed for kids.
So, DW takes modified predestination as the template instead (the timeline is fixed, but can still be tinkered with by the likes of Time Lords without destabilizing the whole thing, because the writers say so — it’s fixed and malleable a the same time). It kind of works. Given lots of “gray areas” in the Doctor’s mind and a willingness on his part to *not* travel into The Future (stapled into relative rigidity by “fixed points”) specifically to check and see how everything comes out (and the part his own actions/inactions have played in that Future), he is free to act in the present pretty much on the same basis that we all act in the present: using the best version we can figure out of our necessarily incomplete information and understanding of the situation, we make our choices as they present themselves and live with the consequences (or not). But any trip into the past or The Future will necessarily involve a lot of “sidestepping”, per bluesqeuakpip’s comment on “Open Thread TV” and people *not* thinking about predestination.
I hope this makes some kind of sense, and is in the right place. If not, I count on the Mods to shift it to someplace better on the site.
6 April 2015 at 21:18 #39449@bluesqueakpip Well, what dingbat heretic I am! Well, probably not — can a person with a Jewish mother and a lapsed (probably) Catholic dad even be a heretic, or do you have to be a Christian before you can become a heretic? Yes, I was thinking of funding the building of churches and leper houses qualified as “doing a good deed” that would help with your Heavenly entrance requirements, regardless of whether people actually went and prayed on your behalf. So what categories of action did count for that, for Christians who didn’t believe that faith alone would get you saved?
As for predestination, how could it be derived from observation? Yes, I can observe that some people are religious and some are not, but on what observed evidence could anyone conclude that those who are religious are already constrained to be religious and so to receive Grace; or that they reliably arrive some time after death in Heaven? All that’s *observable*, so far as I can see, is that some people are more religious than others, for various reasons that *might* include “grace”, but equally might include being carrot-and-sticked as little kids into exhibiting the accepted signs, in their culture, of being very religious. The pre-birth and post-death foundations of the idea are all inference; only the visible behavior in between is observable, and it’s impossible to know by observation whether even that is authentic, or fake piety assumed for social or situational reasons. That’s where the “absurdity” lies, for me. What evidence did the Calvinists et al observe that I’m missing?
Basically, the idea makes no sense to me. If you know all of universal history from beginning to end, then you are pretty much God, and why would you bother engaging at all, or even paying any further attention to the behavior of anyone or anything? What for? Watching a self-designed pageant that can only play out one way at every single branching of every single ensouled being’s tree of choices — yawn. Well, if you’re God, or Destiny (still god), sure, you can do as you please, but my eyes glaze over with boredom at the thought. Meaning — which for me *is* choice, never entirely free of conditions of course, but flexible within a greater or smaller range of possibilities — is leached out of existence.
But for the Doctor, would such knowledge be possible? Has he had the infinite time it would take to visit all of the universe at every moment, or even just at future as well as past “fixed points”? He’s only, what, 900 to 2,000 yrs old. So maybe as a Time Lord in training he studied the Time Lord equivalent of the Akashic Record, but you would probably need many thousands of years to study, absorb, and memorize all of the events recorded there, or even a summary of the high points. He’s a very long-lived time traveler with some special tools and powers, but he’s not God or even a god, so the “gray areas” he now claims to have in his view of events make sense to me. That’s a major advance in terms of accounting for his bothering to do anything at all — but still, why? Why bother? Any action must be adjusted (or abolished) for the time flow to reach the next fixed point (unless his acts already align with that fixed point), or the point isn’t that fixed point any more — it’s changed. He has to be able to act in ignorance of the actualized future in order for his choice of action (or inaction) to be significant beyond the immediate moment of his act/non-act.
I propose a different model of time, one that makes more sense to me, but I’m going to propose it over on the Sofa, I think, and Craig can move it back here if he thinks it’s okay here.
5 April 2015 at 00:37 #39425@bluesqueakpip Ah, they’re the ones with everybody already assigned their rewards at birth or later on by some arbitrary granting of “Grace”? If so, I find that such an absurd notion that I clean forgot about them. What @mudlark says about goodness as its own reward adds a lot more spinners, I’m afraid. I was thinking more about things like people paying to build cathedrals in order to offset their various murders etc. and still win their way into Heaven by virtue of being good toward God, at least.
You know, if we could harness all the energy of all the dead spinning in their graves, we wouldn’t *need* coal or solar or nuclear energy . . .
@purofilion I saw “stertorous” connected with “snoring” or “hissing”, but can’t think of a speech of the Doctor’s that I’d apply that too — unless “husky” also applies, since CapDoc’s voice sometimes goes a bit rough that way.
4 April 2015 at 06:50 #39417@purofilion — Yes! That’s it, exactly what I imagine a very old wanderer of the universe(s) would think and say. It’s not just *us*, humans, who are puny and helpless when large scale natural upheaval threatens. Even Time Lords, even *every*body, is dwarfed by the scale of the laws of physics working themselves out on everything, and too damn bad if you’re in the way, because the universe does. not. care. And that’s why I, too, love ItFofN — something catastrophic is about to happen, and even the Doctor, with all his accumulated knowledge and experience, can’t stop it — but Nature provides a shield for the earth — *this* time. Another time, maybe not. Eventually, surely not. There is no time scale on which “everybody lives”; quite the opposite. That’s in-your-face knowledge for a Time Lord in a way that it’s not for most creatures with a more limited perspective. For humans, trying to act ethically has been supposed to earn a “reward” — God’s approval, permanent Paradise, a pretty nonsense (IMO) that we’ve created as the ultimate security blanket.
The Doctor has nothing like that: he can’t un-see what he’s been witnessing for so long, an endless pageant of ceaseless transformation, which also means of death. Of course he’s a heroic figure, but not for saving worlds or saving the universe. He’s a hero for bothering to act at all, let alone try to be “a good man”, in the face of knowing that it’s all (ultimately) futile: “Nothing gold can stay.” Neither can anything shitty either, but hey, it’s the gold we clutch at. Yes, Arthur’s knights will learn to protect the weak instead of preying on them, but the weak will die anyway, and the Round Table will be corrupted or otherwise destroyed, and off we go again into the abyss (or the world of “Game of Thrones”, which is very similar).
Whoah; how the hell did I get here? Sorry, wandering; point is, I think, that to see darkness prevail over and over in the course of a very long life would be all that’s needed to provide the Doctor with, on the one hand, a natural gloominess of mind more far-reaching than mere Scots dourness. Donna says, “You have to save *somebody*!” The Doctor could respond, “Why? Nobody is ever really saved.” Instead, he tries. Even at his most chilly, unhappy (Clara is leaving), and determinedly detached, he uses those deaths on MotOE to figure out how to save the others. In some ways “Mummy” is a polished piece of noir fiction (lacking only an ending in which Clara or Maisie turns out to be GUS).
“Dark Water” — more astounding every time I watch it. The poetry is there, all right, inescapable, even in the story itself (apart from the lines and their delivery). Here’s Clara, a female Orpheus searching for her male Eurydice, and the Doctor is the god of a hell he purposefully created, with whom she must bargain for a chance to bring back her dead lover. Honestly, isn’t that ridiculous, in a family show with millions of fans? Send in the fart monsters! Only it’s *not* ridiculous, because of Coleman’s focused intensity, and because of what Capaldi does with his character and how he does it. For one thing, how in blazes does he make his face look like a goddamn zombie-skull when he answers three times, “NO”? It’s partly the camera angle, partly how he drops his jaw and rounds his mouth around the “o” sound, and partly, always, the eyes. He looks like a demon, barring our hero’s way, but she won’t give in — so he does.
Oh, the word I think you’re looking for is “stentorian”, meaning (I think) loud and commanding. He’s got that down; talk about a super-power! Damn. Too long, and too late, again; I need an editor, and a merciless one at that.
4 April 2015 at 01:25 #39414@purofilion, @jimthefish MotOE, yes, a gorgeous piece, polished and dark to precisely the right “period” tone — it does stick in my memory as a finely-cut gem, complete with strong moral-dilemma undertones and overtones, and that beautiful little scene on the beach after . . . Just a knock-out. “Listen” is more of a mysterious enigma story, haunting in its own way and leaving tantalizing questions. But for a really *satisfying* piece, Mummy takes it, hands down, for me. Curious to see how people feel about this when the usual re-run orgy starts next summer, leading up to Season 9 — will minds change?
Well, if the show teaches anything, it teaches that change is inevitable, so . . .
Hey, anybody place that line (and give the exact wording) of the Doctor’s remark that something — the earth? the universe? — “grows by catastrophe”? Been thinking about it, but probably I have it wrong.
31 March 2015 at 18:11 #39334@janetteb Oh goodie, what’s the oncoming show on the BBC that you’re suggesting might help me not starve to death on a diet of awful TV between now and August?
@jimthefish Yes, exactly, on how the flash-bang gang of viewers start foaming at the mouth of characters in film fiction actually start showing some *character*, especially *character development*, instead of just blowing things up and running very fast, whether it be Bond or the Doctor or any other iconic protagonist. Though to tell the truth, I think the blow-up-and-run crowd are simply immature, either entirely or just mentally, and it’s useless to complain that they’re being idiotic: what they’re demanding is precisely what suits them at their “age”, however you gauge it. Their anger and bitterness (often on exhibit recently) comes from an uneasy awareness that somewhere out in creative-land, their heroes have grown up and they haven’t.
I know this well from what happened with Science Fiction when the New Wave tailed off (SF writers, mostly UK males as I recall, reinvigorated a faltering genre for a time by importing “mainstream” techniques like stream-of-consciousness to SF), and was then succeeded by a vastly more powerful and up-leveling influx of women writers in the seventies (my colleagues, gods bless ’em). All the genre needed was to charge out into the previously ignored frontier of the kind of human experience the older writers had simply ignored (for the most part; there were always exceptions): emotional life, family life, social life, human behavior as we observe it rather than as suits a plot about chemistry gone wrong in space — you know, the territory we all live in, but that was considered “soft” and “feminine” by the hard-boils old-school guys, many of whom had come from journalism or placing stories in “Popular Mechanics”.
Up went the war-cry, in an all-male chorus as far as I can recall, “SF needs to get back into the gutter where it belongs!” Meaning, back into the land of crappy pulp-fiction with one dimensional heroes of derring-do and obligatory “heroines” who needed “real” things explained to them when they weren’t being rescued, screaming, from intergalactic monsters.
The “Clara Show” whiners remind me so much — and so unpleasantly — of those days . . . I comfort myself with the knowledge of how that has turned out: the smarter, usually younger guys realized what a fantastically more rich field they had to play in once the “other half” of the species moved in and expanded it, and enthusiastically joined the land rush, and out of that we got male SF writers like John Kessel, M. John Harrison, and Patrick Ness, among many others. Bring everybody in, and everybody benefits — except the ones who just aren’t up to the challenge (see the furor over a possible female regen of the Doctor sometime soon . . . ).
30 March 2015 at 09:39 #39304@purofilion You’re a couple of eps behind us, then, so I can’t say much about “Fortitude” without spoilers; we’re closing in on the finale here. It’s sure neat looking, though I have some doubts about the streamlined nordic-modern architecture of the “public” buildings on a remote island with nothing much going for it and maybe 500 inhabs? Pretty, though, as long as you don’t have to *be* there in person. The “magic” cooked up by Gambon (Henry) and the Inuit taxidermy guy is supposedly based on some long-gone “native” superstion that HP apparently knows, and it’s an attempt to protect the boy with the frostbite feet from bad spirits that seem to have gotten into people and driven them to these gory killings. We’ve been getting them in 1 hour slots. It’s all kind of slow, but it does pull you in.
Morse is gone because John Thaw had an actual massive heart attack several years ago that killed him, or so I read somewhere, a bit like Morse in the series’ end. Have you seen the follow-up they teased out of that show, “Inspector Lewis”, with Edward Fox’s son playing Hathaway, his ex-religionist sergeant? They make an effective team with a nicely different dynamic than Morse and Lewis had together. Now there’s young Morse, a show running under the title “Endeavor”, and starting back in — the sixties? I’m not sure; period, anyway, thought modern period.
We’re getting a bit of mix-and-match Doctor here too, keeping us on some kind of rations until we actually get some proper meat almost half a year from now, I guess. It’s all NuWho, I think, but jumbled, very annoying; none of the old stuff.
30 March 2015 at 06:30 #39301@purfilion — mentioned this on another thread, so I’ll try not to be too repetitious here — but yes, I stopped for a look at a Broadchurch episode last week, I think it was, and was, as before, underwhelmed. The characters never appealed to me, and I’m not a Tennant fan (I like my screen guys older and more marked by life, I guess — maybe Tennant is a bit too boyish to interest me), so there’s not much there for me. At least with “Fortitude” I’ve got a solid, adult, watchful Stanley Tucci, and Michael Gambon (who looks like the wreck of Noah’s arc in this show) to watch, and the young Spanish (Portuguese?) woman plays a character with the sense of a heavy back-story hovering behind her.
I did catch a couple of “Gently” episodes, but they’ve been rare over here — I’ll go to acorn for the full set, and Jack Irish is there too, so I’ll try that; thanks! Not all UK crime stuff works for me (well, it would be a surprise if all of anything did). I’ve tried some and wandered on — really enjoyed Morse (John Thaw — well, there you go), even though it got a little peculiar sometimes and I had to forcibly suspend my disbelief in this cultured cop singing cantatas in the choir, getting his perp, and never getting a promotion or being interested in a woman who wasn’t The Killer — huh? I watched what we got of young Morse, like it, ready for more but they’ve just started re-runs of the first season here. Did you see that horrific set of shows that started with “Red Riding”? Jeez, I could barely take that stuff, powerful as it was!
What I’m really after is more of the series about Dalziel and Pascoe which only ran one season here in the US. I guess Dalziel was too ugly for us “lookouts” over here. Too damn bad. Always loved Reginal Hill’s work, miss him.
30 March 2015 at 05:22 #39298@purofilion — “out in a few months” — those words are music to my ears! Except it’s 5 months, which is a bit more than a few . . . Meanwhile, “The Blacklist”, which had legs for a while, has recently gone pear-shaped, formularized, and boring. TV has never seemed such an endless wasteland.
Driving in the car today, errands, tuned to a local Spanish station that also carries “This American Life” and other bits of good radio, but was satisfied just to listen to Freddie Brown’s “La Bamba”, for god’s sake. “I’m not a sailor, I’m a captain!” but I’ve got no vessel, thrash, splash, drowning here . . . Back to the last bit of “Sea of Souls” and more “Midsomer Murders” etc. on Acorn, I guess. The stories are sometimes dull, but the acting is always good-to-better, and that’s worth much.
New book out that I tried to get today at Barnes & Noble, “Why Acting Matters”, by someone named Thompson, I think — I thought I had a review right here —
30 March 2015 at 05:10 #39297@serahni — Ichabod here. I tried Broadchurch again last week — more courtroom, glum faces — I must be just ruined for normally grim “serious” TV these days. I ended up at “Fortitude” again, murky and nutty as it is, because at least it’s got monsters! Sort of. And scenery that wants to gnaw your face off (those jagged, rocky peaks with snow, wind, crazy people running around but somehow never getting frostbitten (except for the kid with no shoes) or dying of hypothermia. It’s every bit as unrealistic and absurd as Broadchurch, but more attractive, somehow. Well, to me.
Went to see “Kingsman” today because I couldn’t resist Colin Firth looking all fit and alert in beautiful suits, with legs long enough to taking him striding across galaxies — but, of course, he doesn’t. It’s all ridiculous and weirdly offensive, even, although they tried not to be completely disgusting, until the end when (spoiler, if anybody cares — I don’t, so here goes) the Queen of Sweden (young and pretty, natch) invites our young hero (a smartened up spiv) for some backdoor sex if he’ll get her out of the villain’s underground lockup, which he does, of course, after “saving the world” from crazy Samuel L. Jackson’s scheme to help “Gaia” rid herself of the plague of human overpopulation by electronically unleashing global mutual carnage, except of course for the chosen few who zzzzzzzzzzz. *burp*
Even Colin Firth can’t save this squirming, spouting, steaming heap. But I know who could (well, if *anyone* could)!
WHERE THE HELL IS MY DOCTOR? THE WORLD NEEDS SAVING, AND I WANT THE DOCTOR! At this rate, we’ll all be dead before August of sheer garbage-overload.
27 March 2015 at 02:57 #3924626 March 2015 at 01:27 #39212Oh, most of my friends are GoT fans, it’s no surprise that lots of other friends are too. It’s a hugely successful show, many cuts higher in every department than the better-than-average — but it just doesn’t grab me any more; what can I say? Except that I went off the Doctor, too, for a few years, so maybe I’m just more easily bored than most viewers. And I’m not a guy, so all the sexy boy-bait scenes do absolutely nothing for me, but that sorta goes for the sexy guys, too . . . Huh. Frankly, I think I’m just more interested in catching up with some newer music these days, so I’d rather go roam around tumblr and listen to the music people bring to some of those sites, as here too.
Strokes ‘n’ folks, what the heck; you love what you love, isn’t that what they say?
ichi
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