tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post7310856912659083625..comments2024-03-18T08:38:01.678+00:00Comments on The Life And Opinions of Andrew Rilstone: Incidentally, a merry Christmas to all of you at home.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-60511765864092881842007-01-28T23:23:00.000+00:002007-01-28T23:23:00.000+00:00"Star Wars, As Re-Imagined by Ronald D Moore"<a href="http://fathermckenzie.blogspot.com/2007/01/star-wars-as-re-imagined-by-ronald-d.html#comments">"<i>Star Wars</i>, As Re-Imagined by Ronald D Moore"</a>Tom Rhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06246157794276270490noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-89181048743512644862007-01-25T00:22:00.000+00:002007-01-25T00:22:00.000+00:001: It's not that the particles are being distilled...1: It's not that the particles are being distilled from the Thames water; it's that, through some process we're not meant to understand, distilling them <i>through</i> the water is particularly neat and effective. It's like making Huon tea -- which, it appears, is a hell of a lot more workable than whatever they must have already had.<br /><br />2: The marriage-activation thing has nothing to do with the Racnoss plot; it's just an explanation for why Donna got fired up and transported aboard the TARDIS. <br /><br />3: Yeah, that's kind of strange. However, for what it's worth, see below.<br /><br />4: It's not that Lance is supposed to be the new "key"; rather, the Empress shoved him full of particles in order to bring Donna back. I guess just pumping him full of Huon particles is enough to turn on the magnetism, yet to be really effective they still have to gestate for a while? As for why this might be, who knows. <br /><br />5: He doesn't break the jar; he fiddles with the cap and brings it close to Donna, making all the particles (within the jar and within her) glow -- as demonstrated earlier. I assume this is the whole proximity thing that Huons have going on. This time, for some reason, the particles are activated strongly enough to suck in the TARDIS (much as Donna was sucked into the TARDIS at the start of the episode). I'm not sure why it worked backwards this time.<br /><br />6: Huon energy is incredibly powerful; when the Empress had it, she was very dangerous. Without it, not so much; she's just an alien spider lady. She's out of Huon energy. Thus.<br /><br />7: Presumably she watches television?aderackhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16269324431155448716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-37580172652344769732007-01-24T17:11:00.000+00:002007-01-24T17:11:00.000+00:00But Rose is torn between the two worlds. She's nev...But Rose is torn between the two worlds. She's never going to quite be part of the Doctor's different world, but even so, her experiences with him are incomprehensible - and vastly <i>better</i> - than life in the world from which she comes, and to which she can only return as an outsider.<br /><br />(Avoiding words like "fag hag" here...)Phil Mastershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12533451060065715833noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-82433424401107189522007-01-24T16:01:00.000+00:002007-01-24T16:01:00.000+00:00Phil Masters said...
Which means that the series'...<i>Phil Masters said... <br />Which means that the series' relationship with mainstream culture - the "straight" world, in every sense - is going to be ambiguous at best. It's okay so long as the inhabitants can accept you for what you are, but... my dear... the clothes and the people.</i><br /><br />I’m not sure I really think this holds up. Rose is certainly part of the “straight” world of tower blocks and shop jobs, and one of the chief themes of the series is how well she adapts to the Doctor’s invite, without ever giving up her old life. (Every previous assistant has had an either/or choice between the TARDIS and their own world.) To the point where it’s a poignant moment where she has to go back to the straight world.<br /><br />You could certainly make the argument it’s she who’s the protagonist of the first two series. As Andrew mentions, she at least represents a humanism the Doctor can forget about. (For example there’s a running theme of how she’ll ignore master/servant distinctions, implicitly because she’s not from posh origins herself.)Gavin Burrowshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-62085521786325593962007-01-24T13:12:00.000+00:002007-01-24T13:12:00.000+00:00One of the things I like about your writing is tha...One of the things I like about your writing is that you seem to be able to take quite dull, genre-ridden affairs and make them sound more interesting than they are. One of the paradoxes of your writing is that you often do this while complaining about the uninteresting nature of such affairs!<br /><br />This time you seem to suggest the Doctor and Donna relationship is the Doctor and Rose relationship inverted. The whole point of Donna is that she <i>doesn’t</i> step into the TARDIS, that she goes home to suburbia and Christmas turkey. And this separates the two audiences rather than the customary act of uniting them.<br /><br />Yet I wonder if you’re misreading the way such humour words. I quite liked the gag “You’re in the TARDIS.”, “That’s not even a word. You’re just <i>saying things!”</i> Taking it much more seriously than it probably deserves, doesn’t that implicitly put <i>everyone</i> on the fan side of the divide? Most people know what the TARDIS is, and the few who don’t could probably work it out. (I sometimes think fans over-estimate their isolation, and with it their specialness. My Mum has heard of Spider-Man for example, even if she couldn’t tell you the first issue where the Sinister Six appeared.)<br /><br />In a similar way most people reckon they would have heard of a Cyberman invasion, so feel entitled to finger-point at someone who wouldn’t. Everyone likes to be inside of something, which creates the need for someone forever outside of something, which in turn creates the need for characters like Donna.<br /><br />Dave Sim once remarked, when he was touring the comic shops, that each shop had a legendary uber-fan customer that all the other customers joked about. There are geeky outsiders within groups of geeky outsiders, so I can’t see why there shouldn’t be Pringle tasters within Pringle tasters.<br /><br />Personally I found the episode so much a mash-up of previous episodes (including –ahem! - the previous Xmas special) that it veered towards becoming a clip show. And Donna refusing the TARDIS call is scarcely surprising when it’s already been announced who the new assistant was and it wasn’t very likely to be Catherine Tate anyway. As such it was enjoyable enough, in a slurry Xmas TV-watching sort of way, but hardly memorable.<br /><br /><i>It would be going too far to say that Mickey and Rose are realistic characters… But they are -- ahem -- semiotically coded as 'real' people. However much weirdness is going on around them, they stay within the narrative discourse of soap-opera, which is the closest TV gets to 'reality'.</i><br /><br />For some reason a belatedly very obvious comparison now occurs to me. I’ve lost count of the number of arguments I’ve had with comic fans who’ve claimed Sixties Marvel put ‘real life’ into superhero comics, with me arguing an Aunt who has a heart scare like clockwork each month is probably nearer to soap opera than real life. Nevertheless, while this is nearer to splicing two genres together than the works of Checkov the splicing works, as in it revitalizes the two genres.<br /><br /><i>The real Doctor had to get out of dangerous situations using his wit, his ingenuity, his cleverness. This one has such a large supply of rules-busting gimmicks that nothing can really challenge him.</i><br /><br />And how! There’s the great line in Girl in the Fireplace where the Doctor explains the fireplace to be a Spatio-Temporal Transporter because “I didn’t want to say magic door”. But magic wands and magic boxes need rules to limit their usage, or else the writers are taking a Tony Blair attitude to their executive powers. I firmly contend the TARDIS should be a kind of Narnian wardrobe, taking our cast to a fresh new quarrie… I mean planets, then whisking them off again at the end. It should be barred from appearing anywhere except for within three minutes of the opening or closing credits. If anything otherwise is attempted again, stern-looking men should come along and put stripy tape around it.<br /><br />For some reason I get less annoyed by the sonic screwdriver because it was intended from the start to overcome trials, traps and other limitations in the scriptwriter’s imagination. It’s cheating, but at least its <i>established</i> cheating. The overuse of the TARDIS is <i>new</i> cheating.<br /><br />I quite <i> like</i> the psychic paper, however, because it’s a kind of microcosm of what such programmes need to do. They need to act as a kind of stem cell, providing basic information but suggesting a whole lot more - which each individual viewer is then able to fill in for themselves, to their own likings. ‘All things to all men’ is the watchword of mass transmission.Gavin Burrowshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-87140340324125623202007-01-24T12:31:00.000+00:002007-01-24T12:31:00.000+00:00The trouble is that RTD doesn't even try to make a...<i>The trouble is that RTD doesn't even try to make any of this make sense.</i><br /><br />But this has pretty obviously been the way of things since, oh, the first few episodes of the revived series. RTD has junked any last vestiges of any claim to coherence or skiffy logic. I though it was clear long ago that you have to either live with this or walk away.<br /><br />And I'm afraid that my key to understanding what he's doing with the title remains the assumption that he sees time-ands-space as a metaphor for gayness, specifically perhaps the experience of the gay kid from the sticks arriving in the city and encountering a gay scene for the first time. It's exciting and wonderful, and also scary and physically dangerous from time to time, but of course the idea of going back to that boring repressed previous reality afterwards is too horrible for words.<br /><br />Which means that the series' relationship with mainstream culture - the "straight" world, in every sense - is going to be ambiguous at best. It's okay so long as the inhabitants can accept you for what you are, but... my dear... the <i>clothes</i> and the <i>people</i>. And things like <i>Eastenders</i> and Pringles are acceptable so long as they are sources of camp amusement, but anyone who takes them seriously is too boringly straight for words (just like anyone who takes vintage SF TV programmes too seriously).<br /><br />I did quite like the flying Tardis, though. It struck me as an instance of something that the programme should logically have featured since the very beginning, but which the special effects technology can only now handle. And it can be explained in terms of the Doctor getting the darned thing refurbished during a downtime phase of the Time War. Of course it's going to be a problem for the future - how many other problems can be resolved by a flying Tardis? - but if Star Trek and most superhero comics can forget this sort of thing from episode to episode, I'm sure that RTD will be amnesiastically fine.Phil Mastershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12533451060065715833noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-35140243652210645762007-01-24T09:41:00.000+00:002007-01-24T09:41:00.000+00:00Mostly, I am in total agreement.
One thing thoug...Mostly, I am in total agreement. <br /><br />One thing though: I don't think that insulting the mainstream (via Donna) is as dangerous as you think: people have an amazing ability to think that such insults are aimed at <i>everybody else</i>, not <i>them</i>, and thus instead of feeling cross and got at they will feel superior to the X-factor watching, Posh-and-Becks-caring-about masses (after all, <i>they</i> only watch X-factor to laugh at the bad contestants with an ironic detachment). <br /><br />And if that doesn't work, well, the line is delivered by the baddy, so can be safely ignored anyway. <br /><br />Davies, whatever you may think of his sanity, is a clever scriptwriter: he has managed to have his cake and eat it too -- then go back in time and eat it again just for good measure.SKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09102522819364312684noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-33788177223446747932007-01-23T18:58:00.000+00:002007-01-23T18:58:00.000+00:00I just read your blog entry with interest.
Congra...I just read your blog entry with interest.<br /><br />Congratulations on an articulate, thoughtful, entertaining and thoroughly engaging piece. Though I admire Russell Davies, and will forgive him much for his resurrection of Doctor Who, you do put up a persuasive argument.<br /><br />Nonetheless, I will continue to admire him and his gorgeous, shonky programme, and to love the Tennant.Pennygwynnehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03750603546965212136noreply@blogger.com