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Archive for the ‘Doctor Who’ Category

Goodbye, David

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

It is a rite of passage for every Doctor Who fan to loudly proclaim that they absolutely hate and despise the new Doctor. I say this not for myself (I’m keeping an open mind about Matt Smith–I’ve been through this process too many times to make rash judgments), but I was watching David Tennant’s last hurrah with a couple of newer fans, and one of them was not happy. I get that. I’ve been there.

Being a Doctor Who fan is often an exercise in managing disappointment. We often have felt as the Doctor seemed to about the Master. Sometimes we just want to tell the show, “You could be brilliant. You could be beautiful,” whenever we feel that it is not, right at that moment, completely up to snuff.

I’m not saying I’m completely disappointed by the end of Doctor 10; but it could have been so much better.

Taken together, The End of Time parts 1 and 2 are something less than the sum of their parts. They both contain a number of scenes that could be pulled out of their respective episodes, and used as evidence for the series’ utter brilliance. Yet, put together, along with a great deal of padding and nonsensical red herrings, that brilliance was buried, somewhat.

But it’s still there, of course. The intimate moments between the Doctor and the Master, or between the Doctor and Wilf; the petulant admission that this incarnation of the Doctor didn’t want to go, yet; the look on the Doctor’s face as he realized that he’d managed to survive his encounters with both the Master and the Time Lords, but would never the less have to sacrifice himself to save the life of a faithful friend (as contrived as that situation was, it was still a powerful piece of acting); and, of course, many other moments. How could all these scenes still fail to redeem a pair of episodes that just didn’t satisfy in combination? How did they all fail to come together in any elegant sort of way?

It’s about time. Specifically, it was about a pair of episodes that were just too damn long. A good episode should run like a Swiss watch, but these two didn’t. They sprawled, they were sloppy. They had scenes that should have been shortened or cut, but were required so as to fill up the available space. They were spectacularly over-built. But I still had a good time watching them. I don’t feel sorry for either myself or the franchise.

I do feel a little sorry for David Tennant.

Doctor Who has been blessed with some amazing actors. Tennant is one of those, I think. He really got to act is ass off in his swansong episodes, and I respect that work. But he was almost crowded out of what should have been his finest hour. (Though, somehow, the final story of any given Doctor hardly represents their actor’s greatest work on the series. The only exception to this I can think of is Peter Davison.)

David, I’m sorry–I’m so, so sorry. For all the not very good things you were asked to do, you nevertheless gave your all, and were a magnificent Doctor Who. But, in the end, you really didn’t get the best script for your final attempt. It was entertaining, yes.

But it could have been beautiful.

Tennent Watch

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

From the A.V. Club:

[...] Doctor Who lovers may be delighted to the point of squealing to learn that David Tennant has signed on to star in NBC’s pilot Rex Is Not Your Lawyer. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the show is about a Chicago attorney, Rex Alexander, whose panic attacks force him to begin teaching his clients how to represent themselves in court.

Although I am far too dignified to squeal, I will at least offer a cautiously optimistic harrumph.

Tie-in One On

Friday, March 6th, 2009

It’s taken me a long time to get back to this one. But, okay: Sci-Fi tie-in fiction.

For the record, I’ve got nothing against the authors of tie-in fiction. Hey, a job’s a job. I won’t even go so far as to say that tie-in fiction is generally bad or generally good, because I haven’t read enough of it to make that case on a general basis. Okay, yes, there are a few specific examples of a couple of Star Wars and Star Trek books that I didn’t like, but I’m not going to name names because, frankly, I don’t think it was the writers’ fault that I didn’t like their work.

Actually, there’s one sliver of the sci-fi tie-in market on which I do feel somewhat qualified to speak: the Doctor Who franchise. Because I have actually read a lot of those books.

I enjoy them on a certain level, otherwise I wouldn’t bother with them. And yet, the quality really varies. Again, not to name names, because I respect the writers too much to call them out for something I don’t think is their own fault. Because, in the end, I think there’s a structural issue that tie-in fiction has that original fiction doesn’t have to deal with as often.

It hit me as I was listening to a To The Best of Our Knowledge podcast on Sherlock Holmes. As a preface to some interviews with modern writers who have written their own Sherlock Holmes stories, the host said something like about how the character might have been created by Arthur Conan Doyle, but he’s always belonged to the fans. Which I thought was a phenomenon of a more recent vintage. But, of course, we’ve been taking ownership of our fantasies, whatever their origins, since the days of campfire tales of gods and kings. Which is the key to why tie-in fiction has some problems that are often misinterpreted as being related to the quality of the writing involved. But, really, the problems are not (usually) with the actual prose on the page, but with the nature of how we share our fantasies.

Look at it this way: When you pick up a work of original fiction — Larry Niven’s Ringworld, for example — you’re meeting a cast of characters for the first time. All you know about Louis Wu, or Speaker-to-Animals, or Teela Brown (to stick with our example) is what the author tells you about them. With his help, you form a picture of them in your mind, and (since the author knows what he’s doing) they act in ways that makes sense for the characters, throughout the book.

This is not usually the case with tie-in fiction. I pretty much know what the Doctor’s character is, and how he’d react to an arbitrary set of situations — at least, I think that I do.

And that’s kind of a problem. Because the model of the Doctor and his companions that I have in my head is likely not quite the same as yours, or that of the writers who have created all those tie-in novels. More to the point, after listening to a couple of American authors speak confidently about what Sherlock Holmes would think or like or do, in that podcast I mentioned earlier, I realized that I’ve got hundreds of these little character algorithms in my head that tell me how characters from various movies, TV shows, books, and comics should act. They’re all highly individual to me, these algorithms, and they don’t match what tie-in writers have in mind.

I’m not right about my interpretations of how fictional characters would think or talk or act, of course. What’s right when it comes to the emotional life of an imaginary nine-foot tall walking carpet? But, I still have these things rattling around my head — for good or bad. So, when I read tie-in fiction that does not accord with the equations of my Fan Processing Unit™, the result is not smooth, quiet operation, but rather a clunking noise that hurts my head.

And how is any of this the writers’ fault? If they weren’t generating headaches in my own personal cranium, it’d only be somebody else’s that’d wind up getting rattled. You can’t win them all.

Of course, there are some tie-in writers who are not at all gifted at using the written word to generate pictures in people’s minds. But if you combine mediocrity with clashing character models, it makes the lackluster prose seem worse than it is. It generates rage, sometimes. And, hey, Cormac McCarthy himself could write the most gut-wrenchingly epic Star Trek noel of all time, but it would still grind my gears if he got Kirk all wrong, as I see the character. I understand the reaction. But that doesn’t mean it’s justified.

So beyond — or, rather, parallel to — Scalzi’s excellent points about why people who write for a living would be willing to involve themselves with tie-in fiction (money and creative opportunity, mostly), also consider this: Many tie-in authors are fans, and they’ve got as much right to think they understand these shared characters and universes as anybody else.

We don’t always agree. That’s what fandom is for.

Who?

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

‘INDEFINABLE MAGIC’: A term coined by fans who cannot for the life of them explain why they watch a tacky, cheap kids’ show. ‘Well, it has that indefinable magic, dunnit?’

From the Completely Useless Encyclopedia, by Chris Howarth & Steve Lyons.

It’s taken me a while to come up with an answer. I know the question was why someone should get attached to a show where the cast changes so frequently, but I couldn’t help but get tangled up in all the confusion over why I like the show in the first place.

I’ve been a Doctor Who fan for more than twenty years, and that quote up there just about sums it up for me. I’ve spent more than half of that time, off and on, trying to figure out why I like the show as much as I do. The weird thing about Doctor Who fandom is that it, itself, has been doing the same thing as well. Star Trek fans (note: I like Star Trek, too) don’t have these kinds of crises of faith, they just get on with their technical manuals and Klingon language classes.

Fortunately, I don’t have to explain the whole tacky, 70′s era stuff (I hope), because we’re talking about the new series. And, I don’t have to explain why I dig the show, but rather, why the revolving cast doesn’t stop me from digging it. So….

It does seem a little weird to get attached to a show where the main character changes. It didn’t work on X-Files, Northern Exposure, or The Dukes of Hazzard, for example. At best, you miss the old actor too much to enjoy the new one. At worst, you feel like somebody’s trying to sell you on a cheap imitation at full price.

Of course, there are some franchises that go through these changes fairly successfully. The one that leaps immediately to mind is the James Bond series of films. We were expected to believe that Connery, Moore, Dalton, and Brosnan were all the same guy — and enough people bought into it that they’re still making Bond movies (though they had to do a reboot for the last couple of them).

Actually, it all got a little bit silly with Brosnan, didn’t it? In his first film they had his boss call him out for being a 50′s era relic, but without explaining why he looked like he was in his mid-forties. They never mention on screen the fact that Bond’s face keeps changing, and that he somehow doesn’t age.

Doctor Who does things completely differently. As a writer for Doctor Who Magazine once pointed out, the main character is never recast in some subtle way, whenever the actor decides to leave. They make a big deal of it — a huge deal. Names are leaked to the press, the announcements are made like the new guy is about to be given some major award, and when the regeneration finally happens, it’s with all the build-up, drama, and special effects the production team can muster. It’s about as head-on as you can get. Bells, whistles, smoke and lights and — bam! There’s the new guy.

Still — so what if the show has the most blatant, bombastic cast changes in the business? It’s still a casting change.

But it’s only a casting change. There’s so much of the show that stays right where its always been. It’s still about a guy who travels through space and time in a blue police box, there’s still alien civilizations to meet, and the destruction of Earth to prevent. And of course, the Doctor is still the same.

Sorry, that doesn’t make sense. It’s just that, while the spectacular regeneration scenes give the lead actors the cover they need to have different personalities, builds, and habits, the over all character of the Doctor himself doesn’t actually change much. Because they never take the character so far from himself that he’d wind up in the midst of an invasion or cruel dictatorship only to turn around and say, "Sod this for a game of soldiers, let’s get the hell out of here — there’s this great nightclub on Perseus 2 that I’ve been dying to check out!"

All of the things that make the Doctor "the Doctor" remain, no matter who plays him: The over-developed sense of justice, the willingness to put his (and his companions, it must be acknowledged) life on the line to make a point, his general distaste for violence and his readiness to kill vast, huge swathes of other life forms when all the pacifist stuff doesn’t work — this doesn’t change.

And the companions — um, do I have to? Oh, all right.

The companions in the new series, at least, get much better treatment that the old series ones ever did. (With the possible exception of Sarah Jane.) The whole thing with Rose was bittersweet because we knew from the start that it would have to end, but that’ didn’t stop them from wringing every last ounce they could out of the goodbye. Problem is, how many times can you do that?

At least they get character arcs and development, these new companions. In the old, er — not so much.

Well, that’s all I’ve got, anyway. Boiled down, it’s like this: What’s good about the show isn’t entirely due to the actors who appear on it, so that when they change, a lot of good stuff remains, and that makes Doctor Who worth watching no matter who’s on screen at the moment.

Or, possibly, we Doctor Who fans just like getting our hearts broken over and over again. We’re strange people.

Assimilating Their Culture (Poorly)

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

[Warning: This post contains references to Doctor Who, which many people may find boring, or excessively nerdsome.]

"Doctor Who" is one of the great bastions of British television. We don’t want to get bogged down in the details here, but the classic series ran for something like 26 years, and its latest incarnation has been running for four. Not bad.

I myself have been a "Doctor Who" fan for a number of years now, in spite of the fact that I’ve never even set foot outside of the United States, never spent my Saturday afternoons eating beans on toast, waiting for Match of the Day to wrap up, and never saw a complete episode of Blue Peter or Basil Brush.

Now, a rumor (as well as some irrational panic in the face of baseless speculation) has sprung up over the possibility that the BBC might (possibly) be considering an attempt to produce "a domestic version [of "Doctor Who"] tailored to American audiences."

Of course, no such thing is likely, and we’d like to go on record, here and now, and say that it’s not going to happen. Not now, not ever. And if I’m wrong, why, I’ll eat a sandwich.

But, please, don’t expect us to hide behind that old "quintessential Britishness" argument (… at least, not until a couple of paragraphs from now…): given the special effects, explosions, violence, and vigorous make-out moments, I think an American production team could find a lot of familiar material to make hay out of.

No, what bothers us is this: any attempt to produce an American version of Doctor Who could only be seen as an attempt to take a viable, middle-of-the-road media property (which is what the show is, in America, at this point) and try to make a boisterous ratings smash out of it. And that just seems wrong to us.

Because it couldn’t possibly work.

Sure, we’ve stolen several shows from other countries that later went on to become hits: "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," "The Office," and "Steptoe & Son (renamed "Sanford & Son"), just to name a few — but that’s no guarantee: Let us not forget the lessons of "Men Behaving Badly," and "Coupling". An American "Doctor Who" would probably struggle to find an audience and, let’s face it, U.S. networks have a poor track record when it comes to being patient with shows that need time to build viewership.

So, while we might agree with Christian Cawley’s assertion that the best hope for making "Doctor Who" a hit in the U.S. is to better position the British version on American television, we would also suggest that such a thing would be a hell of a long-shot.

In spite of the penetration of cable television in the U.S. market, it’s not total. Smash hits are certainly possible on cable, but network shows still do remarkably well, relatively. And there’s hardly any chance that a major network would pick up "Doctor Who" because, well, when’s the last time you saw a British show on American network television?

Actually, when’s the last time you saw a British program on any American channel, cable, network, or otherwise? Yes, there’s been a few — "Absolutely Fabulous" on Comedy Central, "Doctor Who" on SciFi — and there’s always BBC America, right? A lager question, in my mind, is why there have been so few British shows re-broadcast in the States? What is it about Americans that we can’t seem to get on board with an un-retooled foreign TV show?

Well, that’s not entirely true, which is a cause for some hope. An informal survey of my own TV viewing leads me to believe that the king of British television in America is PBS, home to "Masterpiece Theater", "Mystery", and countless "Brit-coms". In fact, PBS was home to "Classic Who" before the term was even coined. Which makes it a good candidate to host any hypothetical "Doctor Who" block-buster-based campaign.

Except… well, I know this isn’t fair, but there’s one important aspect of British television in America that we’ve yet to address. It is, or at least has been, widely seen as a defining interest of American nerds. And what’s the nerdiest British show of them all? Well, it’s "Monty Python’s Flying Circus," actually — but "Doctor Who" is a close second. (This fact was confirmed by no less authority than "The Simpsons", in an episode where the morbidly obese Comic Book Guy is spotted pushing a wheelbarrow full of tacos down the sidewalk, proclaiming, "Yes, this should provide adequate sustenance for the Doctor Who marathon.")

(We should probably admit at this point, in the interest of full disclosure, that we do watch a hell of a lot of British TV, that we really like stuff like "Blake’s 7", Gerry Anderson, and whatnot. We are sad, frankly.)

This is the disconnect that will hinder any attempt to turn "Doctor Who" into huge hit, and this is the schism that will infect any hypothetical adaptation. "Doctor Who" is a good program — but in the U.K., it’s an institution. Here, it’s a cult show for open-minded people and oddballs. Someday, the barrier may be broken. I certainly hope so, at least. And it would be nice if "Doctor Who" was the show that did it.

But I really, really doubt that it will.

Archive for the ‘Doctor Who’ Category

Goodbye, David

Tennent Watch

Tie-in One On

Who?

Assimilating Their Culture (Poorly)

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