The Life And Opinions of Andrew Rilstone

Sunday, November 06, 2022

Chibnall and I (4)

4: Squee

All fictional characters are constructs: David Copperfield and Dorothea Brooke just as much as Charlie Brown and Buzz Lightyear. Some of them seem to be real, but they never are. Karl Ove Knausgaard uses a writer's box of tricks to create the impression that he's telling us every detail of his life. But it's really only a tiny, stylised fragment. If he'd written everything down I suppose the world itself could not contain all the books that would be written.

But some characters are more constructed than others. Darth Vader is a two dimensional villain; but he does have a life story. He's defined by it. Little pod-racer slave; cynical Clone Wars apprentice; secret marriage; protégé of Palpatine; dead mother; younglings; Sith apprentice; Death Star; Alderaan; Cloud City; Endor; Redemption. Secondary canon sometimes adds to the story arc."Anakin had an apprentice named Asoka" is now a true fact across all media. But if a secondary source significantly contradicts that story arc, we reject it out of hand. Darth Vader can't be an ally of Count Dooku in the Clone Wars.

This means that new and interesting stories can arise inside the plot-arc, and be generated by it. The current Darth Vader comic book has a plot thread in which a post-Empire Strikes Back Vader makes contact with Sabe, the hand-maiden decoy of Amidala from Phantom Menace. She has worked out that the Dark Lord must be Anakin, but doesn't yet know that he was the one who killed Amidala. Things follow from this premise: our knowledge of Vader's plot arc makes us wonder how he will react, and what will follow. If we had no knowledge of Anakin Skywalker or Amidala, it is much harder to get worked up about the storyline.

You may think this is a lazy way of writing. You may think that it is cheating for one text to borrow significance from another. You may think that it amounts to a weaker writer stealing from a stronger one; to give his story an emotional impact it hasn't really earned. You might even think that this is why some people use "fan fiction" as a pejorative. I can't stop you from thinking any of those things.

But the Doctor doesn't have that kind of story arc. They don't really even have a biography. Or if they do, it remains pretty much exactly where it was in 1963. "The Doctor ran away from their home planet a long time ago and has been wandering ever since." That's pretty much the whole pitch. You can add "They used to be friends with the Master, but now they are bitter enemies" if you want to. If you are a fan, you can reel off sequences of events: "exiled to earth", "temporarily elected President of Gallifrey"; "changed their name during the Time War": but these aren't part of who the Doctor is. Incremental changes work their way into the story and become things which everybody knows: Sonic Screwdriver, Time Lords, Two Hearts, Gallifrey, Twelve Lives. But those are facts about the Doctor, not events in their story.

Perhaps that's the difference: Darth Vader is a sequence of fictional events; Doctor Who is a bundle of fictional facts. Der Doktor ist alles, was der Fall ist.

Chris Chibnall would very much like "used to work for the Division" to become part of the Doctor's story. My guess is that it won't take. Doctor Who always regresses to the narrative mean. The story can't grow beyond "they ran away from home to wander in time and space". If it did, it would no longer be Doctor Who.

When Ian Chesterton was introduced into Doctor Who in 1963, we knew two things about him: he was a thirty-something male, and he taught chemistry at a London school. When he departed in 1966, we had not learned very much more. He was still a thirty-something man; he was still a chemistry teacher, but now he was a thirty-something chemistry teacher who had spent two or three years travelling with the Doctor.

I am sure we could assemble a list of trivial facts about him. He and Barbara had divergent opinions about the Beatles. His chemistry classes included Boyle's law. He like cricket more than he likes football. And we could deduce facts based on his age and profession. Evacuated from London in 1939; National Service in the army in 1950; retired from teaching around the end of the twentieth century.

His life after leaving the Doctor is not a completely blank sheet. There was a plan for him to appear in the 1983 story Mawdryn Undead (which was set in a boys boarding school) but the actor was unavailable, so the part was rewritten for the Brigadier. His name appears on a sign outside Coal Hill School in the 50th Anniversary story Day of the Doctor. (He's the chairman of the governors.) The School is only Coal Hill School in a manner of speaking: a kind of joke, or hyperlink, a chance for fans to stroke their beards and say, yes, well, of course, that was the name of the school that appeared in the very first episode in 1963. (And again, in Remembrance of the Daleks, for the twenty-fifth anniversary season, in 1988.) He talks to a camera about his adventures in a framing sequence for the VHS release of a partially wiped black and white story called the Crusaders. And in the children's TV spin-off, Sarah-Jane mentions in passing that there are two Oxford Professors, Ian and Barbara Chesterton, "who haven't aged, not since the sixties."

And for those who care about such things, he appeared in a dozen novels and fifty audio adventures. (Fifty!) Probably some comic books too.

But none of this makes any difference. The appearance of Ian in Power of the Doctor is not a new chapter in a fictional character's life-story like the Return of Sherlock Holmes. It isn't a retrospective addition to a story arc like the Book of Boba Fett. The Ian who is surprised that Graham refers to the Doctor as "she" is a ninety something man who taught chemistry in a London school in the 60s and travelled with the Doctor for a couple of years. He is Ian. That's all he can ever be.

If you think about it as a story, it breaks. The serious man in the suit and the punkette who calls everything wicked don't fit into one story. You might as well show Big Bird, Frankenstein and the Mayor of Casterbridge at a support group meeting. Graham says that if he told anyone about his adventures in the TARDIS he would be thought insane, which is more or less word-for-word what Ian told the camera in the Crusade framing sequence. But hang on: aren't Jo Grant and Kate Stewart at the meeting too? Isn't this a world where there are government and extra-government organisations specifically to deal with alien threats? Where dinosaurs have been sighted in London (more than once) and the government has used Daleks to suppress public disorder?

Well, no, it isn't. And it can't be. Doctor Who is about alien worlds invading and intersecting with the ordinary present day. So the ordinary present day world must always be the starting point. It's not like a Marvel movie where everyone remembers New York being flattened by aliens, and treat superheroes as a kind of ultra-celebrity. Every meeting with the Doctor is the first meeting with the Doctor; every alien invasion is the first alien invasion. A support group meeting -- even a Tegan/Ace team up -- is very close to being a contradiction in terms.

So why is it such great fun? Why we fans lap it up?

Fan fiction is not just a niche hobby: it is a state of mind. If I say "Tellytubbies and Edge of Darkness take place in completely different universes" then your fan-brain starts to picture nuclear waste pouring into Tellytubbyland and Tinky-Winky testifying before a House of Commons inquiry. You can't stop yourself. I do it too. It's what being a fan means.

Sarah-Jane said that Ian married Barbara, and that they both became dons at a prestigious university, and appeared to be the same ages that they were when they left the Doctor in 1966. So why is the Ian in Power of the Doctor well into his ninth decade? Well, the story of the Immortal Academics can't be true. Sarah said it was only a rumour, after all. But that's interesting in itself. The rumour must have come from somewhere. Ian and Barbara must have done something in order for the story to attach itself to those particular names. (Sarah hadn't heard of them from the Doctor: the Doctor doesn't talk about previous companions.) Maybe Ian and Barbara took a life-prolonging drug in an un-transmitted William Hartnell adventure; and maybe the drug had a finite duration, and poor Ian has done all his ageing in one go, like Steve Rogers. (That must have happened a couple of decades ago: he looked about 70 when he was talking to his un-named visitor about Richard the Lionheart.)

But that's quite boring. So, then after years of living together as ageless academics, Barbara is called to...Skaro...by, let me see, Thal Space Travellers...to aid reconstruction.... But Ian cannot go with her for...reasons....and bereft, he chooses not to take the drug any more.

Weak? Okay. Some years after leaving the Doctor and going their separate ways Ian and Barbara discover that clones -- robots? androids -- with their faces have been installed in Oxford University. But to what purpose? Well, in one of the quads they discover...

If you have ever asked a word-of-God Christian about an obvious contradiction in the Bible, you will know how the game works.

I think some people like these kinds of teeny tiny cameos because they give them raw material to create fan fiction from. I think this is why fans cluster around franchises with uncertain or contradictory canons. And I think this may be why some people are perfectly okay with perfunctory and fragmentary story-telling. If you are a certain sort of person, the merest hint of mutual attraction between the Thirteenth Doctor and Yasmin generates a whole archive of "Thasmin" romances. A resolution, one way or the other, would spoil the game. Some fans were very cross with J.K Rowling and Rian Johnson for giving their stories the wrong sort of closure. Once Harry has married Ginny and Luke has retired to Ach-To, the sacred texts lose their exegetical potential.

Nostalgia isn't as good as it used to be. It's okay to look back, provided you don't stare. When I was a teenager, some of the stars of the golden age of radio and the last days of Music Hall were still alive. It was just barely possible to get Chesney Allen into a TV studio and stagger out a few lines of Underneath the Arches. And if you were a certain age, that was a wonderful thing to see, even if his performance left a little to be desired. Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney still give pretty good performances: but we'd probably turn up and applaud them even if they didn't. Being Bob Dylan is quite an achievement in itself. So perhaps Chibnall is just providing us with a curtain call. Literally his last bow. It's giving us a chance to affirm how important the early days of Doctor Who were to us and how important William Russell was to the early days of Doctor Who. To say thank you, in a way. Perhaps they could have arranged for him to have tea with Paddington Bear.

Doctor Who has never just been about Doctor Who. It has always partly been about the making of Doctor Who. I suppose any movie buff might be quite interested in knowing how his favourite film was put together; but Who fans are more interested than most in peeping behind the curtain. There were books like The Making of Doctor Who and the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special before there was organised fandom, and before that, there was Blue Peter. The process of creation is baked into the narrative itself. We knew from an early age that the nice one with the white hair turned into the silly one with the scarf because an actor name Jon Pertwee wanted to move on and the BBC tracked down an actor named Tom Baker playing Rasputin on a building site. And of course, in Old Who you could very often see the wires and the construction lines.

Fandom created the idea of the Doctor Who family: that having worked on Doctor Who, even as a caterer or a hair-dresser, obliged you to appear at conventions, answer obscure questions, and be greeted with rapturous applause. If Christopher Eccleston doesn't want to do conventions or come-backs, there is a sense that he isn't quite playing by the rules.

When that scene broke on our TV sets, I don't think my first thought was necessarily: squee, squee Ian Chesterton. I think my first thought was squee, squee William Russell. (Good god, is he still alive?)

I** L***** posted a back-stage picture of all the actors together and said that this was what made the episode so special. William and Bonnie and Sophie in a room together. Squee, squee.

There's nothing wrong with it, particularly. But it rather confirms Doctor Who as an exercise in mummification. An endless memorial to a series that can never move forward.

William Russell appeared alongside Marlon Brando as one of the Kryptonian elders in the first Superman movie. He also did a scene with Brian Blessed in Blackadder. He remarried fairly late in life, and his son Alfred is also an actor. This information will be useful to you if you are ever called on to play Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.)

Please do not feed the troll.

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Saturday, November 05, 2022

Chibnall and I (3)

2: Spoilers

There were relatively few trailers or pre-publicity materials prior to the transmission of Power of the Doctor. This led to some fan conspiracy theories. (Everything leads to conspiracy theories.) Perhaps the BBC hated Chris Chibnall and positively wanted the show to fail; perhaps they didn't quite regard Jodie as a proper Doctor because she was a woman. Perhaps they just accepted that the era had been a failure and were now focussed on the 2024 relaunch under the steady hand of Russel T Davies. Or perhaps they hated the fans and wanted to deprive them of the fun of speculating about new the story in advance of transmission.

Or perhaps there were so few Doctor Who trailers because the BBC was woke.

It is perfectly true that we already know more about Ncuti Gatwa's debut, which is still a year away, than we did about Jodie Whittaker's swan-song the day before it was transmitted. But the explanation is probably boringly simple. Russell T Davies is good at publicity. One of my main complaints about his era was that he introduced "NEXT WEEK" trailers which tended to give away major plot twists, and advertised "surprise" villains on the cover of Radio Times. Chris Chibnall, who is probably more fannish, is also a lot more spoiler-averse.

Some people hate spoilers. Other people think that anything which can be spoiled with spoilers wasn't worth not spoiling to begin with. The Sixth Sense is exactly the same movie if you already knew that Janet Leigh takes her sledge into the shower as it would have been if you didn't.

My view is that "surprise" is one of a number of techniques that a writer can use to extract emotions from an audience. Gag-writing may not be the highest form of art, but that's no reason to give away the punch-line. Twists and stings in the tales can be good fun when they work. Serious writers sometimes make use of surprise as well: the very first time I saw King Lear, I was truthfully expecting it to have a happy ending.

I suppose there could be a moral point at stake here. Reading serious literature is good and improving. Reading lowbrow literature is wicked and degrading. Good literature is the kind of literature that is worth re-reading. Twist-ending stories only work once. If I tell you how a Tale of the Unexpected or one of Tharg's Future Shocks ends, all the enjoyment drains out of it. Which serves you righyt: you jolly well ought to have your fun spoiled as a punishment for liking such low-brow rubbish.

Citizen Kane, which famously ends on a surprise revelation, is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made.

There was a short trailer after The One With The Sea Devils that alerted us to the fact that Tegan and Ace, were going to guest-star in Jodie's reincarnation story.

Tegan is a former companion. She arrived in Tom Baker's last story, and stuck around for most of the Davison incumbency. Ace is also a former companion. She appeared alongside Sylvester McCoy in the final two seasons. The Seventh Doctor and Ace have a special place in the hearts of Doctor Who fans of a certain age. After the show was mercy-killed in 1989, they appeared in some thirty-five full length novels (and then a ludicrously large number of audio-CDs.) With Doctor Who off air, those novels -- the Virgin New Adventures -- were all there was. They worked very hard to present themselves as the continuation of Doctor Who by other means. Just as there are fans for whom the "real" Doctor will only ever be Matt Smith or Patrick Troughton, so there are some who think of those novels -- the so called Wilderness Years -- as "their" era. So the return of Ace is a pretty big deal.

Tegan appeared in the twentieth anniversary special, the Five Doctors, with Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee. She appeared with Colin Baker in the thirtieth anniversary skit, Dimensions in Time. She also appeared with Colin in a sketch about a little boy who wanted to be in Doctor Who, part of a TV show presented by a disc-jockey whose name can no longer be spoken. She has a fair claim to have appeared with more Doctors than any other actor.

After leaving the Doctor, Ace turns into a Time Lord. Or else she becomes a space-marine. Or possibly she goes respectable and runs a philanthropic organisation called A Charitable Earth. Tegan has a less established off-screen life, but a slightly mawkish epilogue to the Sarah Jane Adventures implied that she was gay and ended up in a relationship with Nyssa, who was last seen volunteering at a leper colony on a distant planet in a parallel universe.

So, of course, the trailer sent some sectors of fandom into overdrive. Ace and Tegan are coming back. We are going to find out what happens to them. Perhaps the New Adventures would be canonised; perhaps Tegan and Ace would become, er, canonically queer. Perhaps the A.C.E idea would be overwritten. It was really only a one-line gag in the Sarah-Jane adventures, although it was given a kind of canonicity in a minisode filmed to promote a Seventh Doctor box-set, but it never quite fitted in with anything we knew about TV Ace. At any rate: there was some hope that the destinies and futures of these characters would be explored, fan-fiction style.

But some of us boring old fans smiled wryly. Because Doctor Who just doesn't work like that.

What we actually got was two extended cameos. Sophie Aldred and Jan Fielding turn out to look a lot older than they did forty years ago. Actors who had supporting roles in the 1980s and haven't done much since turn out to look quite old fashioned and stagey alongside contemporary TV casts. They get brief meetings with the current Doctor. They each get a three minute scene with a holographic representation of "their" Doctor. Sixty year old Ace gets to wear the jacket she wore when she was a teenager; and biff some Daleks with a baseball bat, like she did in Remembrance of the Daleks. Ace mentions that she saw the Master turn into a cat. (Ooo, ooo, Survival! say fans) and the Master mentions Tegan's Auntie Vanessa (ooo, ooo, Logopolis!) and that's pretty much it. Quite good fun. But not a continuation of the story of Tegan and Ace. Because there really isn't one.

There is, in fact, a story to be told about what it would be like to be an ex-Doctor Who companion: to have travelled all round the universe with God, and then been dropped off in Croydon and forced to pick up the threads of your life. School Reunion (a David Tennant tale) gestures towards a story of that kind, without actually telling it. Sarah Jane seemed to have led a slightly sad, unfulfilled life: everything after the Doctor had been a complete anti-climax. Russell T Davies always tended to use 'The Doctor' as a metaphor for Doctor Who and Doctor Who fandom, and Sarah-Jane was to some extent a metaphor for the sad fan-boy who enjoyed a particular TV show so much that he wasted the rest of his life writing incredibly bloggy essays about it, very probably in his underpants. But this was clearly too much of a downer, and when Elisabeth Sladen fronted her own, (very good) children's TV show, it turned out that having travelled with the Doctor always results in your leading the most brilliant, wonderful, amazing, fantastic, life it is possible to imagine. Sarah-Jane acquired teenaged prodigies who were guaranteed brilliant, wonderful, amazing lives at one remove. Doctor Who is good for kids, it seems, but nostalgia is harmful for grown ups.

It's a story which can probably only be told once, and an actual episode of Doctor Who is probably not the right place to tell it. It probably needs to be tackled in a grown up novel by a grown up writer with the serial numbers filed off. I could imagine a serious novel about a middle aged man in therapy because a psychotic vigilante dressed as a flying mammal trained him as a ninja a few hours after his parents died in a freak trapeze accident.. But it probably wouldn't make a great Batman cartoon. The alternative is to just keep doing School Reunion over and over again, with Liz Shaw and Dodo Chaplet rather than Sara-Jane.

But where would be the point? They had miserable lives or they had fantastic lives; they had a secret they never shared with anyone else; or else they told everyone but weren't believed. They are ever-so-much older than twenty and have forgotten how to fly; but to live has been an awfully big adventure. They think their experiences with the Doctor were a delusion. Everyone else thinks their experiences with the Doctor were a delusion. They are interested in nothing but nylons, lipsticks and invitations.

To Chibnall's relative merit, he kept the other celebrity cameos in the Power of the Doctor a pretty perfectly guarded secret. And they were carried off with a certain amount of panache. When the Thirteenth Doctor encounters David Bradley playing William Hartnell playing the Doctor, I think that many an Old Fan went "mmmm" in the manner of one who has just been reminded of a brand of confectionary that they don't make anymore. And when he turned into Colin Baker and Peter Davison, the "mmm" may have developed into the sound that audiences make after an impressive instrumental interlude, kind of like "nice!" or even "¡Ole!": Paul McGann was more an occasion for punching the air and saying "Yes!" when your team has won an important match.

Jo Martin's cameo was less of a surprise. She's pretty much a character who only exists to appear in cameos. Some people really like her: but I think that what they really like is the principle of there being a black lady Doctor. Which I like too. But there's not enough to The Fugitive Doctor for me to feel enthusiastic about.

But the final moments before the Regeneration can only be said to have brought on a fully fledged fangasm. Yaz has been perfunctorily sent away from the TARDIS; but immediately encounters Graham (along with Dan, who perfunctorily left of his own accord at the beginning of the episode.) Together they go to some sort of hall or community center where a kind of support group for former companions of the Doctor is having its first meeting. We can see the characters who have appeared in this story: Yaz, Graham, Dan, Teagan, Ace, and Kate Stewart -- along with three much older people. Bonnie Langford. Katy Manning. And good lord can it actually be, William Russell. Mel, Jo and Ian. Ian who last appeared in Doctor Who some 58 years ago.

The idea of "support groups" has turned up in the The Boys and in several Marvel Universe films; where the point is that, in those worlds, having been injured by passing superheroes or abolished from existence by a glove-wielding alien demi-god is a relatively normal experience -- as normal as a PTSD group for Gulf War veterans or grief counselling for 11/9 survivors. The "support group" metaphor is a less good fit to the Doctor Who situation: meeting the Doctor is regarded as an exceptional and unique occurrence. There's no particular reason for the meeting to be happening in a community hall: if you took the Doctor Who universe seriously, you would expect UNIT or Torchwood to have provided an ultra-high-security venue for it. But the burden of this essay, and indeed this blog, is that the Doctor Who universe is impossible to take seriously. So let's just sit back and enjoy the irony of a companion support group being run like an Alcoholics Anonymous cell.

Chibnall is a fan, and he knows what he is doing. Characters who everyone loves, and also Bonnie Langford, appear on the screen for only a couple of seconds, and get barely half a line each. And that makes the sequence more special. By the time we've registered what's happening, it's over. It's really the equivalent of a Regeneration Flashback Montage, which happened twice in the original series but was retrospectively declared a Tradition.

If we had known in advance that Jo Jones (nee Grant) would be appearing in the Big Centenary Special we would have spent a year speculating about it, in which case the brief glimpse would have felt like a punch in the gut. The scene works because we didn't know it was coming. Now I have told you about it, I have ruined it.

We know that Bernard Cribbins is appearing in the November 2023 special; and we think we know that the Celestial Toymaker and/or Beep the Meep are in it as well. I hope our guts remain collectively unpunched.

There could be a story about a lot of the Doctor's companions having a meet up. There could be a story about anything. I imagine that at this very moment official fan-fiction is slipping into place in which each of the Doctor's exes sit round and tell a story illustrating some aspect of their Doctor's character and showing how it changed them. And then they probably all go on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. But this isn't that story. It's more like a Play School presenter reassuring the children that Humpty Dumpty wasn't hurt and the ten green bottles weren't broken after all. Don't be too sad. Jo Grant is okay. Yaz and Graham will do just fine. And there's a spare chair for Barbara and Sarah, just in case.

We love these characters; we love Doctor who. A love that asks no questions. The point of the scene is to see Ian, and to be delighted that we are seeing Ian. And this jaded cynical blogger was as delighted as anyone.

But....

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

Please do not feed the troll.

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Friday, November 04, 2022

Chibnall and I (2)

2: Blossom

"Oh, the blossomiest blossom!" exclaims the Thirteenth Doctor. She is just about to regenerate. Her last will and testament, at least until Big Finish get started on the licensed spin-offs.

What is the significance of her words? There is no blossom on screen, blossomy or otherwise, although she does appear to smell something beautiful. Why, taking in one last sunset, is blossom the thing which comes to mind?

In March, 1994, legendary TV playwright Dennis Potter was interviewed by very-nearly-as-legendary journalist and broadcaster Melvin Bragg. It would be Potter's last interview: he had advanced pancreatic cancer, and had asked his doctors to come up with a regimen which would give him the best chance of completing his last two plays (as opposed to necessarily prolonging his life). During the interview, he famously said that his awareness of mortality made ordinary things seem hyper-real.

"At this season, the blossom is out in full now … and instead of saying 'Oh that's nice blossom' … last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it."

So. The Time Lord and the Playwright both independently had the same thought. Blossom is a common enough symbol of mortality, after all. A.E Housman famously decided to go on more frequent woodland rambles when he realised he would probably be dead in only fifty years or so. But can it be coincidence that the Doctor and Dennis Potter should have expressed the same thought in nearly the same words?

It is fairly normal in informal English to turn nouns into adjectives by adding the suffix -y. If something is catty, it has the qualities of a cat. This is a recurrent gag in the pun rounds of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.

"Define Anti-"

"A bit like an ant."

Similarly, you can generally make a superlative by adding -est to an adjective. "Good-est", "evil-est" and "Republican-est" may not be strictly grammatical, but we understand what they mean. And it is fairly common to do both together: turn a noun into an adjective and then turn the adjective into a superlative. Andrew writes a very bloggy blog; Andrew's blog is the bloggy-est blog you've ever come across. The cheesiest cheese; the creamiest cream; and the chocolateyest chocolate are fairly common advertising formulations.

But directly adding -est to a noun is relatively unusual. Dennis Potter coined "blossom-est" as a nonce-word; the Thirteenth Doctor uses the much more conventional "blossomy-est".

Now, in a 1972 story, the Time Monster, the Third Doctor told companion Jo an edifying story about his childhood on Gallifrey. (It wasn't called Gallifrey back then.) On his "blackest day", he asked a wise hermit the secret of life; and the hermit pointed to a very nondescript wild flower. But because he was looking at it properly for the first time, all the Doctor's sense perceptions were heightened; and this helped him through his despair.

"Well, the colours were deeper and richer than you could possibly imagine. Yes, that was the daisiest daisy I'd ever seen....So, later, I got up and I ran down that mountain and I found that the rocks weren't grey at all, but they were red, brown and purple and gold. And those pathetic little patches of sludgy snow, they were shining white."

Producer Barry Letts was a member of the Western Buddhist Order, and what the Doctor was experiencing was a kind of enlightenment -- what might now be described more prosaically as mindfulness. The hermit-figure reappears as a Buddhist monk in Jon Pertwee's own regeneration story, Planet of the Spiders.

As a matter of fact, the word "daisy" is a corruption of "day's eye", but the word could be understood as an adjective, referring to an object with the quality of "dais". Robert Sloman (who wrote the Time Monster) has punningly imagined that if a flower can be "daisy" it could also be "daisy-er" and "daisy-est". (It's the same kind of joke as the one which says that since there is one actor called Tom Holland and another actor called Tom Hollander, there must logically be a third actor somewhere called Tom Hollandest.) It may have originally just been a matter of convenience. It would have been easy enough for Jon Pertwee to say "the buttercuppy-est buttercup" or "tulipy-est tulip" but "daisy-ey-est daisy" would have been quite a mouthful. But we have up with is a striking image of an object which has the quality of being itself to the greatest possible degree: the idea of a state in which reality becomes more real. The idea of an object possessing its own attributes to the greatest possible degree.

There a very many different daisies in the universe with an infinite number of minute differences. One very wise man thought that it followed that there must somewhere be one dasiest daisy of which all the other daisies are reflections or copies. Another very wise man thought that you could define God as the thingest thing: the being who had all conceivable positive attributes to the greatest possible degree. A third wise man reminded us that it is all in Plato.

There is no reason on earth that Dennis Potter and Robert Sloman could not independently have observed that intense emotional states make the world seem more vivid; and no particular reason that they might not both have chosen to describe that experience in terms of flowers. But it is quite a coincidence that Potter chose to say "blossom-est" when he could quite easily have said "blossomey-est".

I doubt that Dennis Potter was particularly a Doctor Who fan, but he probably watched it from time to time. He liked TV and there were't many channels in those days. He found Blake's Seven mildly diverting and used a lot of science fiction tropes in his final, posthumous play, Cold Lazarus. There is a persistent oral tradition that he submitted a Doctor Who script to Verity Lambert in 1964 or 1965. And he was thinking about time travel, in a way: he had just told Melvin Bragg that you have to live in the present because you can't call back yesterday. So it is perfectly possible that he had seen episode six of the Time Monster and been struck by the line.

So. Perhaps the Thirteenth Doctor is simply quoting Dennis Potter: and it hasn't occurred to Chris Chibnall that the line from the interview resembles a line from Doctor Who. This seems a little unlikely.

Perhaps the Thirteenth Doctor is quoting Dennis Potter quoting the Third Doctor. Perhaps Chibnall intends to convey "Doctor Who is so important that serious writers are influenced by it; but even serious writers' words get changed and refreshed over time." This seems rather convoluted.

So we have to say that the Thirteenth Doctor is quoting the Third Doctor directly. The world becomes super-intense to Doctor Jodie in the seconds before she regenerates; just as it had to Doctor Jon on that "blackest day". Although she is very sad to be parting from her companions and getting a new face, a new TARDIS console and a new title sequence, Doctor Jodie remembers the little wild flower that Cho-Je pointed out to her when she was a little boy, and gains courage from the memory -- just as Jo did.

But Chibnall has remembered the scene incorrectly. I think that he thinks that the Third Doctor told Jo that what Cho-Je showed him was "the blossom-est blossom". He thinks he is quoting Jon Pertwee, but he is actually quoting Dennis Potter -- and he hasn't even remembered Potter's quite correctly.

So. Power of the Doctor. A story made up of memories. Quotations. Motifs. References. Fan fiction. Fan service. Celebration. Reunion. One last bow before the final curtain. One half of fandom is cross because Tom Baker (88) didn't show up. The other half is cross because William Russell (98) did.

A long dead TV series, as remembered by a middle-aged man; vague actors vaguely repeating decades old catch phrases, ending with a confused centenarian expressing surprise about what the series has become.

Doctor Who is inseparable from our memory of Doctor Who. If everyone remembers that The First Doctor was grumpy then The First Doctor was grumpy. If everyone remembers that the sets wobbled, then the sets wobbled. If the first thing you think of when someone mentions Gregor Rasputin is that Boney M song, then that Boney M Song is the most important thing about Gregor Rasputin.

History is the parts that you can remember. Sellar and Yateman invented memes half a century before that other fellow.

Live in the moment, because you can't call back yesterday. Sense perceptions are the most real thing. What lives in your memory is more important than what actually happened. We can go anywhere in Time and Space: that's the exciting thing.

Contradictions.

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

Please do not feed the troll.

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Chibnall and I (1)

1: Review

The Power of the Doctor was a load of Rubbish. I enjoyed it very much indeed.

Monday, October 24, 2022

Does Andrew In Fact Hate All Television Programmes on General Principles?

ANDOR

Disney +

Everyone agrees that the first Season of the Mandalorian is marvellous, but thereafter the Star Wars Television Universe seems to generate surprising amounts of controversy. Some people are cross because it references the various animated Star Wars shows; other people are cross because the de-aged Mark Hamill isn't 100% convincing. Some people are cross because it treats the sequels and prequels as canon. Some people are cross because it is made by Disney. Other people are cross because they don't like Star Wars in the first place. (And, of course, the Usual Suspects are cross because it is Insufficiently Racist.)

I can see how you might find the sheer volume of Star Wars material a little intimidating. I can see how you might think "I can't possibly watch the Mandalorian because it continues the story of Asoka, which I am not familiar with" and :I can't possibly become familiar with the story of Asoka because I don't have time to watch seven seasons of Clone Wars and five seasons of Rebels." (I believe some people also have sectarian objections to watching animation.) But holistic concerns apart, the TV Universe seems to have a consistent look and feel and outlook; as well as clearly working towards a vast multi-season meta-plot. If you like Star Wars, these are very much the sequels and prequels and offshoots and sidelong glimpses into the far away long ago galaxy that you have always wanted.

Opinion is understandably divided about how good or bad the prequels and sequels were and there is pretty universal agreement that Solo was a bit of a wasted opportunity, but virtually everyone thinks that Rogue One was awesome. It somehow managed to be a nostalgia fest, plunging us back into the pre-1977 universe of A New Hope, and to repaint that universe in more realistic and dark colours. But it didn't seem to be deconstructing or undercutting the concept of Star Wars, as the Last Jedi arguably did.

That said, when I heard that the next TV show was going to be about Andor, I was slightly inclined to say "Who the hell is Andor".

Not being able to quite remember which one Andor was is not a particular handicap, because the show is, necessarily, a prequel to the prequel. Andor in episode one is just some guy, hanging out on some planet, getting into trouble with some bad guys. He stupidly kills a pair of corporate goons who come after him because he asked the wrong sorts of questions in a night club. He gets recruited by a Mysterious Figure who, unsurprisingly, is part of the Rebel Alliance; sent on a heist mission to rob an Imperial payroll, and, the last we saw, was being sent to an Imperial Prison. I believe the plan is for there to be a two season of ten episodes each, which will presumably show how Nobody Very Much became an established Rebel operative in time to meet Jyn in the stand alone movie.

It's definitely slower paced, more dark and even realistic, than any Star Wars product we've seen before; a spy/heist/war story that happens to be set against a familiar backdrop. We are told that it is going down particularly well with people who have never seen Star Wars, if such a beast can be imagined. The Rebel who recruits Andor has secret meetings with someone called Mon Motha on a planet called Coruscant; and she is seen making speeches about someone called Palpatine in front of something called the Senate; but nothing in the storyline particularly depends on your being able to identify these characters.

It takes a little while, particularly in episode one, to come up with a reason to care about what is happening. And the thought that a guy talking to high class prostitutes in a cocktail bar was not quite in keeping with the U-certificate comic-strip vibe did cross my mind. Where Boba Fett and Obi Wan pointedly show us familiar hardware and aliens, Andor pointedly doesn't, so we have to take it a bit on trust that we're even in the Star Wars universe. But things very much come together when Andor is embedded in a Rebel unit. The heist itself, which naturally doesn't going precisely according to plan, is genuinely exciting. The group includes sinister and unreliable cynics as well as full on revolutionary idealists who write Marxist manifestos in their spare time. It feels like a terrorist cell: well meaning and idealistic and quite reluctant to kill people, but still made up of scary paramilitaries.

We also get a behind the scenes look at the Empire: not as comic book villains, but as a genuinely nasty fascist bureaucracy run by relatively plausible human beings, all watching their own backs while looking for the opportunity to stab someone else in theirs. Col. Yularen's sarcastic chairmanship of internal imperial briefings is a joy to behold.

A mild reimagining of Star Wars and the Empire Strikes Back: it doesn't so much undercut them as open the curtain, shine in some light, and let us see the Empire and the Rebellion from the other side. But it stands alone as a science fictional thriller.

If I despise Rings of Power for not being recognisably Middle-terrestrial, I honour Andor, and pretty much Disney's entire outlook) for continuing to point a camera into what is quite clearly still #myStar Wars.

The Expanse

Amazon Prime

The Expanse reminds me a lot of the the 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica. It's dark, it's dense; it has multiple plotlines going on at once; it's interested in politics. The spaceships feel like big military or industrial vessels: there is no attempt to give us the Red Baron in space. Space feels big and empty and frightening; there are chunks when we could almost believe that we were watching documentary footage from the future. The characters are multi-layered and human. I am quite interested to know how it all comes out in the end. But like Battlestar Galactica, starting a new episode always feels like a bit too much effort. It's compelling without being fun. I have to concentrate slightly harder than I'm sometimes ready for. It's just a bit, how can I put this, mumble, mumble, dull? Big spaceships are only cool to the extent that oil-rigs are cool. Politics involving Mars and the Belt isn't automatically more rivetting than politics involving, say, Egypt and Suez.

Still, it's a convincingly assembled world; and there have been passages of genuine tension. The bigness and the smallness of the plot impressively coexist: the action shifting between Politicians having important congresses; a small team of spacers having a bad time; and a Blade Runnerish private eye in over his head. Doubtless, in the way of Game of Thrones, the whole thing will fit together by the end. I will certainly remain on board until the end of Season One, but there are something like 50 episodes to get through....

Ms Marvel

Disney +

A realistic young person in a realistic setting is transformed into a superhero and has to deal realistically with the consequences. For whatever values of "realistic" are appropriate in a universe where people can be turned into superheroes, obviously.

Ms Marvel really isn't "A Muslim Superhero" any more than Daredevil is "a Catholic Superhero". She was in 2013 very much what Ultimate Spider-Man had been in 2001, and come to that, what Spider-Man had been in 1962. A fresh, sassy, street-wise engagement with the whole idea of superheroes. A fantasy about the hero who could be you, or at any rate, your mate. A teenager with the attitudes and world-view of a teenager; who happens to be of Pakistani Muslim heritage. (The original Spider-Man was very probably Jewish.) Ultimate Spider-Man was originally shunted off into a parallel universe, but Ms Marvel takes place in mainstream Marvel Continuity. "Realistic" comics and "comic booky" comics no longer have to be kept apart: social realism, of a kind, is the new normal.

So far as I can tell "Ms" is pronounced Miss rather than Muzz. When the first Muzz Marvel comic book appeared in, good lord, 1977, "Ms" was felt to be rather a feminist statement: I think it is now a pretty standard female honorific.

The Disney+ / MCU series is quite a freeform take on the comic book. The characters are all in place: the over protective Ammi, the rather embarrassing Abbu; the super-religious but also incredibly cool elder brother; and of course, Bruno the almost-too-nice on/off white boyfriend. Kamala herself is a head-in-clouds superhero geek, specifically a fan of Carol Danvers: the first episode involves her and Bruno sneaking out of the house to attend AvengersCon, which her parents don't approve of ("You want to go to a party?" says her mother in disbelief.) I like very much the way that superheroes are treated as celebrities in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and that superhero fans are like comic book nerds. (The Captain America Musical was one of the high-points of last year's Hawkeye series.)

Her origin is quite a bit different from the comic book. It no longer involves the Inhumans and the Terrigen mist: instead, she is connected to a group of extra-dimensionals called the Clandestine, her powers activated through a magic bangle, that once belonged to her grandmother. Given that the Inhumans, give or take a cameo, don't yet exist in the MCU, this was probably inevitable. Comic book Kamala is interacting with the denizens of Marvel New York within a couple of issues; but TV Kamala's encounter with her heroes is left to the last possible moment.

The comic book Ms Marvel's powers were arguably the least interesting thing about her: she can change size and stretch her body not entirely unlike Reed Richards; but on TV she achieves similar results by creating and manipulating a sort of crystal webbing. (I am slightly disappointed that this means she has lost her catch-phrase "embiggen".) As is par-for-the-course, we only see her fully operating as a superhero in the final episode, when she also acquires her costume and nom de guerre. "Kamala" could be understood as "marvel" in Urdu, allegedly.

Iman Vellani is quite ludicrously good in the role; heroic and down to earth, childish (she travels with a cuddly sloth as a nap pillow) without ever being cute, funny without being flippant. We will imagine the comic book character as her from now on, in the way that Tony Stark is become Robert Downey Jr and Samuel L Jackson is forever Nick Fury.

I wasn't completely onboard with the middle episodes where the action shifts to Kararchi, and Kamala briefly time-slips back to 1947. (There's a lot of it about.) This seemed to foreground the characters ethnicity just a little too much. Ms Marvel is kind of the first Muslim superhero (unless you count The Arabian Knight created by uber-hack Bill Mantlo as far back as 1981) -- but her religious heritage isn't the most interesting thing about her. It also means that we got to see less of her New York supporting cast: I thought the series really came into its own in the final episode when Kamala and her friends are besieged in their school by a nasty anti-superhero quasi-police organisation called Damage Control. Kids and the local community pulling together to defend themselves with science projects, softballs, fire extinguishers and mostly the power of friendship seems much more what Ms Marvel is about than Indian Partition. (I did enjoy the "British Occupied India" caption.) That said, the cultural stuff is really well handled: I loved the brief scene at an Eid celebration where on-screen captions identified the different groups in the Jersey City Muslim community (the trendy young Mosque Bros; the mostly white Converts). Kamala goes to Mosque, takes it for granted that there is a separate women's section, but complains that it isn't as well maintained as the men's. The imam is cool and likeable.

The series only runs to six parts, and our next meeting with Kamala is in a forthcoming film called The Marvels where she (presumably) gets to hang out with her namesake heroes. While the whole point of the wider Marvel Universe is that the characters become part of it, I hope that Ms Marvel's meeting up with the actual Avengers doesn't deprive Kamala of the relatable ordinariness which is kind of the whole point of her. Peter Parker didn't get to be Peter Parker for long enough before he was hanging out with Tony Stark and helping to defeat Thanos.

NOTE:

Captain Marvel was created in 1939 by Fawcett comics, but ceased publication in 1954 after a lawsuit from DC Comics. DC themselves acquired the rights to the character in 1972; but in the intervening years Timely comics had become known as Marvel, so Captain Marvel became simply known as Shazam!

Captain Marvel is completely unrelated to Captain Marvel, an alien superhero created by Stan Lee in 1967, specifically to establish Marvel Comic's right to use the name. The pretext was that his real name was Mar-Vell, which is now such an established part of the lore that fans can't see how silly it sounds. In one Apocryphal story he merged with Eternity and became the Mar-Vell Universe.

Captain Mar-Vell had a human girlfriend called Carol Danvers who became known as Ms Marvel when she acquired superpowers. When Mar-Vell dies of cancer, Carol Danvers becomes Captain Marvel in her own right. Although Kamala admires Carol Danvers this Ms Marvel has no connection with Ms Marvel apart from the name.

Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel have nothing to do with Captain Marvel a black female police officer with the ability to transform herself into a beam of light, who first appeared in 1982. (Her real name is Monica Rambeau, and a character of this name has appeared in the MCU Captain Marvel movie and the Wandavision TV series.)

When Captain Marvel ceased publication in the 1950s, British publisher L Miller created a similar character called Marvelman. Where Captain Marvel's powers depended on the magic word Shazam, Marvelman's depended on the word Kimota. (Shazam is, of course, Mazahs spelt backwards.) When Marvelman was revived by Alan Moore in the 1980s, Marvel Comics insisted that his name be changed to Miracleman.

Captain Marvel shared his magic word with a number of other heroes, creating a Marvel family which included Captain Marvel Junior, Mary Marvel, and Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. If Baz Luhrmann is to be believed, Captain Marvel Junior was one of the main causes of Elvis Presley. The magic word was also used by an Egyptian wizard; who became a super-villain but was then partially rehabilitated. He took the name Black Adam but is so obscure that no-one would ever consider putting him in a movie.

The Elgin Marvels are sculptures in the British Museum, but many people think they should be returned to Greece

Paper Girls

(Amazon Prime)

Sat down to watch Ms Marvel; found my Disney+ link had temporarily gone away; picked Paper Girls off Prime more or less at random. Instantly hooked.

I'd seen adverts for the comic book at least seventy six times, and never been particularly intrigued by them. It's written by Brian K Vaughan who wrote the remarkable and still ongoing Saga saga, which has been described as "Kinda like Star Wars meets Game of Thrones". Saga isn't actually very much like either of those two franchises; but it's hard to sum up a hundred and fifty issue graphic novel in ten words. Paper Girls is equally unlike Back to the Future meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In 1988, four twelve-year-old girls (Erin, Karina, Tiffany and Mac) are out delivering newspapers on their bicycles, which was a thing which kids did in the Olden Days. They time-slip into the future, which is to say, the present, which is to say, 2019. The first four episodes of the series are about them figuring out what is going on, coming to terms with how the world has changed, and attempting to go home.

There is the thinnest possible science-fiction backstory. Some baddie time travellers from the far future are trying to change the time-line to their advantage, and some goodie time travellers are trying to stop them. But the interest in the show, so far at least, depends on the basic time-travel situation, which skilfully avoids going in any of the most obvious directions. Naturally, the girls are sometimes bemused by modern technology. When one of them inadvertently sets off a voice-activated Alexa smartphone, they assume that there are "really robots" in 2018. But relatively little space is given to the dropping of jaws or "gosh, isn't the future amazing" moments. They are much more worried about the realisation that their parents (and pets) are mostly long dead, and that familiar buildings have been pulled down and built on. The bulk of the drama comes from character situations. Erin encounters her fifty-year old self, who has entirely failed to fulfil any of her childhood ambitions. Mac tracks down her now-middle-aged elder brother who has unexpectedly turned into a successful middle aged doctor. He somewhat reverts to childish attitudes around his younger sister, who is distinctly unimpressed when he acts like a responsible dad around his own kids. ("So, it started with me and Dr. dіldо, over here, shooting off illegal fireworks, then he took me on a shopping spree, but then the clock struck 3:00, and he suddenly turned back into a total prick".)

I've just got to the part when the guy from the Rebel Alliance reveals that he has a giant robot in the barn, and everyone flies off through a wormhole, presumably ending up in an entirely different time-zone. If it's anything like Saga, plot threads are going to multiply as things proceed: but so far it is both clever and compelling and I really want things to turn out well for the main characters.

Erin is Chinese-American, Karina is Jewish, Tiffany is black and Mac is white. Mac is sometimes quite prejudiced and Karina pulls her up for it. I assume that some people in the writers' room consume large quantities of tofu.

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

Please do not feed the troll.

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Oh F*ck, Not Another Elf

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

For the last month my lovely Patreon subscribers have been getting early access to my essays on the Rings of Power and matters arising.

I've now collected the whole thing into a lovely little PDF booklet, running to a shade under 100 pages.

It is currently available on Ko-Fi as a pay-what you like down-load.

My Patreons have mostly pledged $1 for each essay, meaning they've paid around $10 or £8 for my thoughts: do please pay whatever you think my writing is worth. (That's your actual moral pressure, that is.)

What I would like best is for you to join the select crew of Rilstone Fans who pay me a quid or so each time I publish something substantial: all my Patreons have already got access to the virtual book.

I can't actually stop you subscribing to Patron, reading the essays, and then unsubscribing without paying anything, but I will know who you are and I will judge you.

I shall now rejoin the human race for a few days and then start writing about something else. The Rings of Power essays were rather "shooting from the hip"; the next set may be a little more through.

Please do not feed the troll.

Join Patreon

Buy PDF booklet

Leave one-off tip.

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

Rings of Power Episode Eight, wherein these reviews come to an end

https://www.patreon.com/posts/rings-of-power-73404984

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you would like to read this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.)

Please do not feed the troll.

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Monday, October 17, 2022

Rings of Power, Episodes 8, part 1

https://www.patreon.com/posts/rings-of-power-8-73380435

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

Please do not feed the troll.

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Monday, October 10, 2022

Appendix

This week, Private Eye dusted off a hoary old joke that was first used, to my certain knowledge, in 1977.

A fictional academic, Dr Euydice Pipkin, complains that Rings of Power is insufficiently faithful to Tolkien's work. The script, she says, ignores Tolkien's stipulation that "in strictly dynastic terms the Herbs were scions of Akond the Swat" and references "Christopher Tolkien's splendid Scraps Retrieved From My Father's Waste Paper Basket, 1957-1963."

In fairness, Private Eye has been making the same jokes every fortnight since 1961. Every issue, teenage poet E.J Thribb writes an excruciating obituary in free verse ("So, farewell then, Hilary Mantell..."); nearly every week student radical Dave Spart gives an incoherent and self-contradictory op-ed on some left-wing theme. (Unfortunately, Owen Jones has rather stolen his act.) The regular book review column is generally intelligent and perceptive, and sometimes even fair. (The Eye is half satire and half actual journalism.) But it generally includes a spoof entitled What You Didn't Miss which parodies some dull, pretentious tome -- often a biography which lovingly records the lunch dates and voting record of a long-forgotten back-bench Tory MP. So Tolkien is certainly not being singled out for six column inches about "Lord Twiglet, high marshall of the Snurdlings."

The joke about Christopher Tolkien recycling texts that his father had thrown in the bin is very old and not very funny. The six thousand or so posthumous pages were not discarded scraps but documents that Tolkien himself had preserved, labelled, annotated, placed in rough sequence but never prepared for publication. But he did intend them to be published: at one point he issued an ultimatum that Unwin could only publish Lord of the Rings as a four volume work, with the fourth volume being the never-completed Silmarillion. This would, in fact, have been a much better way to proceed: The Lord of the Rings In Four Volumes With Epilogue and Backstory is one of the most interesting tomes in Morpheus's library. The rather haphazard Appendices are a poor substitute.

The Private Eye joke relies on a very familiar trope: people who don't like Rings of Power, or Peter Jackson's parody of the Hobbit, or indeed Ralph Bakshi's 1978 cartoon, are extreme pedants and purists who no work could possibly have satisfied, and their opinions can safely be ignored. Don't mention that the cognoscenti were on the whole very pleased with the 2007 Drury Lane musical and Brian Sibley's 1981 radio series.

This stuff happens around other geeky properties. No-one will ever believe me if I say that I dislike a particular episode of Doctor Who because I think it badly written or poorly acted: they assume that my real objection is that it contradicts a footnote to a reconstruction of a lost 1966 black and white William Hartnell story. Why on earth would people who like Star Trek think they have the right to an opinion on Star Trek? That's not who Star Trek is for.

Very few Marvel Comics fans complained when Thanos, a deity who has conceived a courtly romance with Death was transformed in the cinematic universe into an alien with a Malthusian theory about population control. Avengers: Endgame was basically just a very good film, regardless of how selective it was about its use of half a century's worth of superhero lore. A giant purple gorilla who wants to kill everyone in the entire universe with a magic glove is a lot of fun regardless of the fidelity of his backstory.

Certainly, some critics can be a little on the pedantic side: but it is does not follow that all criticism is pedantic.

Oddly enough, Sir Lenworth Henry's sweet interview in this week's Guardian also lapsed into stereotypes. He could have said that the people who objected to the dark-skinned Harfoots being played by actors with, er, dark skin were racists. He could have sent they were unperceptive critics, or that they hadn't read their Tolkien carefully enough. Instead, he pushed back against them for being bloggers:

"They’re sat in their pants, eating Hobnobs and looking at their computers, slagging off anything different."

They're not wrong; they're sad.

I don't know exactly where the pants thing originated. Simcha Jacobovici has repeatedly described people who are skeptical about his claim to have discovered the grave of Mr and Mrs Jesus as "underwear blogger". He imagines these people -- including some very eminent New Testament scholars at prestigious universities "sitting in their underwear, eating out of pizza boxes, spending their days and nights attack me and others personally." He even provides a cartoon so we know what pizza and underwear look like.

If a writer doesn't bother to get dressed in the morning, the article isn't worth reading, if the article isn's worth reading, the writer can't be properly dressed. In the olden days they used to wear dressing gowns and silk pyjamas. Maybe we should all move back to garrets.

According to the Tale of Years, Ar-Inziladun came to the throne of Numenor in or about the year 3175 of the Second Age. Ar-Inziladun is an Adunaic name; Adunaic being the ordinary language spoken by the men of the West. But he adopted the Quenya Tar-Palantir as his Regnal name, to signify a renewed friendship between Numenor and the Elves.

Tar-Palantir had one daughter, Miriel, and a nephew, Pharazon. Tolkien does not say that Miriel ever acted as Tar-Planatir's regent, but he doesn't say that she didn't: the history of the Second Age is necessarily a bit sketchy. He doesn't say that Miriel was blind, either, but since her father's name means "the farsighted" the idea has a certain mythic irony.

Now, Numenoreans practiced primogeniture -- the crown (or, in fact, the sceptre) passes automatically on the monarch's death to the eldest child, regardless of gender. So when Tar-Palantir dies, Miriel ought to become Queen. But in fact, Pharazon will seize the throne. (He's already appeared in Rings of Power: he's the slightly shifty chancellor who assured the guildsmen that Galadriel wasn't going to take their jobs, but I don't think he's been identified as the king's brother's son.) He is going to force Miriel to marry him, even though Numenor does not generally permit marriage between "those more nearly akin than cousins in the second degree". He'll then embark on an humongous war, which will end with the complete and utter defeat of Sauron. But instead of destroying or exiling him, he will have the bright idea of dragging him back to Numenor in chains, which is, of course, precisely what the Dark Lord wanted all along.. In Numenor, Sauron will take on the role of Bad Councillor in the mould of Wormtongue. (I imagine that Tom Hiddleston has already read for the role.) He will sows in the king's mind the idea of cheating death; and Al-Pharazon will take a war fleet to Valinor with a view to stealing immortality from the gods. This will result in the complete and utter destruction of Numenor. It will also result in the setting being transformed from a disc world to a spherical one. God evidently feels that if he is going to react, he might as well over-react. Someone called Elendil will escape from the devastation with his children Isildur and Anarion, and they will found a kingdom called Gondor and not live particularly happily ever after. Isildur's bane, and all that... This is all going to happen in the next century or so: in the lifetimes of the Isildur and Elendil and Miriel. Numenoreans live longer than ordinary humans, but not nearly as long as elves. (They are also quite a bit taller than humans, incidentally: which is why the four foot Hobbits are known as Halflings.)

Now, according to the introduction to Lord of the Rings, Hobbits first show up in Middle-earth over a thousand years later, at the end of the first millennium of the Third Age. But Tolkien -- probably writing in the persona of Merry -- says that Hobbit legends tell of a time when they lived in the land between Mirkwood (nee Greenwood the Great) and the Misty Mountains. That's roughly where the Harfeet are plying their caravan trails in Rings of Power. (Tolkien talks about Hobbit legends recalling their "wandering days", which presumably suggested Poppy's song in Episode Five.) I don't think Tolkien intends us to think of there being proto-Hobbits in Middle-earth in the Second Age, but I don't think the text positively says that there weren't any.

What it definitely does say is that the Istari -- the five wizards -- arrived in Middle-earth, not un-coinicidentally, at the same time Hobbits were first noticed, about the year 1,000 of the Third Age. We know that they are Maiar -- lessor deities, clad in mortal flesh -- but they are specifically said to have come over the Sundering Sea in ships. That's why to start with Cirdan the shipwright was the only one who knew who they were. Valinor is a physical place accessible by ship, where embodied beings have infinitely prolonged lives. Even after the world becomes round, you still get to it in a physical boat, across a kind of magic bridge. The Istari did not drop out of the sky at the end of the Second Age.

Tolkien also tells us that during the Second Age, the Elves of Eregion became allies of the Dwarves of Moria. He says that it's the closest friendship the two races have ever had, as a result of which, the Elvish smiths of that time became the most skilful that there have ever been. He says that the Elves initiated contact with the Dwarves because Mithril had been discovered in the mines, and that Gil-Galad-Was-An-Elven-King sent Elrond to Eriador as an embassy. That's reflected quite closely in the TV show: the idea that the Elves need the Mithril to stop themselves from "fading" is a rather unsubtle embellishment, but the brotherly love between Elrond and Durin Jr is as good a way of personalising a fairly dry chronicle as any.

However the friendship of the Elves and the Dwarves happened in the the seventeenth century of the Second Age -- a millennium and a half before the time of Elendil and Isildur. The Rings of Power were forged even earlier, between 1500 and 1600; Celebrimbor dies in 1697, when Sauron has already been active and operating from a Dark Tower in Mordor for five hundred years. The idea that the black land magically turns black, and Mount Doom starts spitting fire, during the reign of Tar-Palintir seems to delete about three thousand years from the Time Line. (The idea that the land is blackened on one particular afternoon as a result of a deliberate action, as opposed to being gradually ruined over centuries of neglect and exploitation seems very much against the spirit of Tolkien.)

I can't see any way of reconciling this. The Moria plot and the South Lands plot are both taking place in the same time-frame, because Galadriel and Elrond meet at Gil-Galad's palace in the first episode. Events in Tolkien's history has been squished together: the resurgence of Sauron, his defeat, the corruption of Numenor, and the forging of the Rings now take place over decades rather than centuries. There seems to be no narrative space for a fair-faced Sauron to prowl Middle-earth disguised as ~~Santa Claus~~ Annator Lord of Gifts.

Adaptations are allowed a certain amount of freedom. There are scenes in Shakespeare in which messengers rush in and say "The Irish are revolting" and "The Irish have surrendered" thus condensing months of politics into thirty seconds of stage time. It's quite all right to make up words for Elrond to say to Durin, or imagine what Tharazon said to Miriel on their wedding night, just as much as it is to imagine a conversation between Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn. That's the job of historical fiction. But there comes a point when the sequence of events are so scrambled that what you have has ceased to be historical fiction altogether. And that can work, I suppose. There are Westerns that care a great deal about their American History, and there are cowboy stories in which "Billy the Kid" and "Butch Cassidy" fight at the siege of the Alamo. (I distinctly remember Frank and Jesse James visiting Laura Ingalls in Minnesota. I think Bob Ford sat next to her in Miss Ingles' schoolroom). And, I mean, if you want to write a story in which Tony Blair defeats Saddam Hussien in single combat and is knighted on the deck of his own ship bt Queen Elizabeth, I can't stop you. But it's disconcerting to think you are watching one type of drama and discovering you are watching the other.

"Men of the Middle-ages! Today is the first day of the Hundred Years War."

I am at this moment wearing the same jeans I wore yesterday and a rather natty red pullover from Primark. I may not have quite showered or shaved but I have drunk a great deal of coffee. Under no circumstances would I put biscuits or pizza near my keyboard.