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 Doctor Who loving sucks! (note: Not endorsed by Jersualem.) Yes, it's that time of year again, right after the Doctor Who season ends, when your old pal/guy who's always wrong about DW Toxxupation comes and reviews every single garbage bad stink episode of Series Ten. Like last year, Oxxidation had the good sense to drop out of this nightmare, so I'll be joined by forum mod Jerusalem this time around. Same format as always, however: Jerusalem and I will watch every single episode, write reviews on them, the thread'll call me crazy, there'll be a bunch of arguing. Repeat twelve more times. What the Hell is This: A Newbie's Guide In case you're new and/or just decided to click on this thread in the TV/IV subforum, first off: Get out while you still can. Only death awaits. Secondly, welcome. This is a review thread for the Doctor Who reboot, wherein I, Toxxupation, watch all the episodes of a given season of a given TV show, then write incredibly long, overly verbose reviews of the same. I've done this a couple of times before: you can check out my Last Man Standing review thread (seasons 2 and 3) here. It's goldmined so you should be able to read it regardless. After the LMS thread I was the victim of what can only be adequately described as "a swindle" that got me to review the entirety of the Doctor Who reboot. I did that. You can (and probably should, if you're not familiar with DW) read it here (requires archives). All the straight-up reviews are linked in the first post, so you don't have to read a 377 page thread from end-to-end, because that's insane. Also, fair warning: My first couple seasons of reviews are not great; there's too much emphasis on summarization (something I eliminated from the reviews as they got longer/more analytical), and reading them now the summaries have aged especially poorly. Beyond that, I slowly fell in love with (after virulently hating for like half a decade) Doctor Who over the course of the thread. There's no pretense now; I love Doctor Who, even though and often especially because it's a bad show for idiots, I love writing about Doctor Who, and apparently people love reading my thoughts about Doctor Who, if only to tell me how wrong my opinions are. Last year (2016), I decided to finish what I had started and reviewed the entirety of Series Nine immediately after it finished airing. You can read the thread here (requires archives). The reviews are a lot better, and I'm pretty proud of it, especially the one I wrote about "Heaven Sent". Series Ten of Doctor Who has just finished airing stateside, so Jerusalem and I are gonna review the entirety of the season, starting with the 2016 Christmas special ("The Return of Doctor Mysterio") and through the twelve episodes that make up Series Ten, once a week. My scale is A-B-C-D-F, no pluses or minuses. In between the 2016 thread and now, I found I missed the dynamic that Oxx and I had (and I felt like it made both the reviews and thread itself more interesting when each episode had reviews from two different perspectives), so I asked Jersualem, Guy Who Reviews DW Episodes For Funsies In His Free Time, to join me. Like the cool dude he is, he agreed, so we're going to proceed through this season the same way the old, first thread had: I'm going in blind, Jerusalem has seen the season as a whole, and we'll be writing from those unique perspectives. My reviews will be heavily reactive, focusing on my immediate perspective knowing little-to-nothing about what comes next, and J-ru's will be more long-view, dealing with the overall themes of the season as a whole and his opinions about it. Thread Rules:
Stuff I Was Inadvertently Spoiled On: With that all being said, most of the people who read this thread want to know how much I actually know about a season before I watch it. Because I follow television news really intently, I ended up spoiled as just a matter of course from reading Onion AV Club. For those people, here it is, stuff I already know going into this season (Again, this is stuff I'm saying that still falls under the "no spoiler" rule. Don't confirm, deny, or talk about them, this is just a list):
That's literally all I know. I know nothing about what's in the season, I don't know any twists about any episodes, I don't know who the next Doctor is, I don't know if the next Doctor has been announced. This is the least I've ever known about DW in the past...like...ever? I guess? I mean, I know practically nothing about Series Ten. Update Schedule: Like last year, Jerusalem and I plan on updating once a week, typically Saturdays. We will be reviewing each episode individually (no bunching of two-parters, one episode a week, one review per episode). I'll be posting my review first, then Jerusalem will post his right after. A Note Usually I post a review thread with a review already in the can, but I'm not doing that this time to surface the fact that idonotlikepeas is running the traditional "Doctor Who Guessing Game". Details below. First review will be up this Saturday, July 8, 2017. If you want to know what to expect to calibrate your guesses better, here: Although I disagree this is a weakness due to my ideological view on how episodic works should be appraised, many people find fault with how I'll grade an episode removed from context or expectation. In other, simpler terms, I find that just because something might be or "will be" paid off in the future does not make a "bad" thing that happens now any less bad. By the way I'm "Toxxupation", "Occupation", or "Occ". If you read people referring to one or more of these terms, that's me. Or "Lick! The! Whisk!" I guess. I change my username a lot. Review Archive: 1000, "The Return of Doctor Mysterio" Jerusalem's Review NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Celery Jello posted:Oh man, I love this and I am looking forward to it. 10 Hate yourself. 20 Hate neoliberals. 30 GOTO 10 cargohills posted:Is it already policy of yours to not watch the next time trailers? If not then it really should be. They spoil quite a lot this series. I don't watch the trailers unless specifically instructed to, no. I also don't watch any extra canon/shorts or whatever unless the thread tells me to.
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Jul 3, 2017 02:26
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Vanderdeath posted:I doubt it would've fit but the title for this thread should've been "Time Lord Forgive Me But I'm Back on my Ol' Bullshit" imo God, it should have been.
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Jul 3, 2017 15:57
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_Doctor_Mysterio in which 
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Jul 8, 2017 02:19
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Jul 8, 2017 02:20
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Jul 8, 2017 02:22
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Jul 8, 2017 02:23
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Oh yeah - next review, it'll help if you're a comics fan. Not necessary, but it'll help.
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Jul 8, 2017 02:25
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Doctor Who "The Return of Doctor Mysterio" Series Ten, Episode Zero Last year, I became heavily interested in American superhero comic books. I read them vociferously, voraciously - I read the entirety of Jonathan Hickman's saga from Dark Reign, through Fantastic Four and FF, into Avengers/New Avengers, ending on Secret Wars, some three or four hundred comics spanning the course of a decade. I read the entirety of Grant Morrison's Batman run, which is something like three hundred comics over eight years. I read all of Ultimate Spider-Man. I read Kieron Gillen's young Loki saga, one of the best reinventions and redefinitions of a character possibly ever. I read Fraction's Hawkeye, I read Alias, I read Ms. Marvel, I read Squirrel Girl. I read the entirety of every single Bat-Book in the New 52 that didn't have Red Hood or Batwing in the name. And many, many more besides. Before then I had no real interest in American superhero comics. I read manga as a teen, and by the time I was an adult I switched over to webcomics. I picked up trades from time to time, but it was mostly the classics - "The Killing Joke", Watchmen, et cetera. It was never a part of my life growing up, and unlike stuff like manga comic books don't have clean start and end points. All this added up to a life more or less ignorant of American superhero comics beyond whatever the latest Marvel movie was. Doctor Who, ironically, may have been the motivation to get into them in the first place - if people who read last year's thread remember, I queried it when I was interested in getting into comics. The similarities between DW and comics fans are obvious; they're both heavily interested in niche, genre-specific multimedia with an insane amount of content, backstory, lore, and characters. And like DW, when I was given a good roadmap of where to start and what to read, I got heavily invested in comics in a way I never had before. I had finally understood the pleasure of being a comics fan, and as a result grew to appreciate the medium for its own artistic merits. And that meant, well, reading a fuckload of comics. So, although I wouldn't call myself a comic book "expert", not by any means, I would definitely consider myself knowledgeable about comic books, and able to converse about them on a fairly deep level. So, obviously, when it comes to superhero comics, there's pretty much only the Big Two: Marvel and DC. Yes, yes, there's imprints like Young Animal and indie stuff like Valiant, but for all intents and purposes those are the main two choices. And what's most interesting is how, even some half-century or more later, and after influencing each other in so many different ways great and small, DC and Marvel still have very distinctive creative voices. DC focuses more on the heroes as heroes, while Marvel focuses more on the heroes as people. I mean, this isn't exactly a new or revelatory insight; as the old saw goes, "Marvel writes people who happen to be superheroes, and DC writes superheroes who happen to be people." We can compare and contrast each company's founding hero: Superman is literally the best person ever, of all time, while Spider-Man is a depressed teen with serious self-esteem issues who caused his uncle's death with his hubris. Each publisher took their respective cues from that foundation; everyone knows who Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman are. They're aware of the Justice League, and The Flash, and on and on and on. On the other hand, people use the names "Peter Parker" and "Spider-Man" interchangably, or "Tony Stark" and "Iron Man". Until the billion-dollar movies, though, most people would've looked confused if you asked them about The Avengers. In that same vein, if you were to ask someone for the secret identity of a Green Lantern they'd have no idea what you're talking about. No approach is better or worse, they're both just different. DC focuses its attention on elevating its stars as modern-day gods, of the Greco-Roman variety, so everything they do and everything they are is larger than life. They are as much symbolism as they are character, in the sense of Wonder Woman encompassing Feminism, Superman representing Compassion, Batman personifying Justice. In contrast, Marvel focuses on lowering its mains, of illustrating them as real people with real flaws and having to deal with real problems. Having to make rent, or go on dates that go badly, of having to deal with peer pressure. They live in real places like New York City or San Francisco, as opposed to Superman living in the urban utopia that is Metropolis, or Batman living in Gotham, aka Every Crime Ridden Hell-Hole City Combined. DC attempts to market comics as fantasy, while Marvel attempts to market them as reflections of reality. And, thinking on it more, this is essentially the difference between RTD and Moffat. Or, more specifically, their differences in view of The Doctor. RTD always focused on the idea of The Doctor as symbolism, so he would represent the very best aspects of base humanity. This idea - that The Doctor is a symbol, first and foremost - both explains and justifies RTD's successes and failures during his tenure. The Doctor, in Davies' opinion, is a god who walks among us and elevates certain special people, his followers (or...Companions), into the halls of greatness. Every single woman who meets him wants to gently caress him, because who wouldn't want to gently caress a god? Who wouldn't want to gently caress Superman? It also justifies the central thesis RTD meditated on while showrunning, because the main conflict for a living embodiment of all that is good in the universe is that he isn't. The only thing, in RTD's world, that can beat The Doctor is The Doctor (or The Evil Doctor, which explains why The Master was such a recurrent villain), so we constantly came back to the question of if The Doctor was good or bad. His morality was the only thing keeping him in line, so when he failed he failed catastrophically - he commits genocide in "The Runaway Bride" because he allows himself to be evil for a split second. When The Doctor is able to triumph over his own internal failings, it emphasizes the point - when the show constantly asks if The Doctor is good, having him prove that he, ultimately, is, reinforces its central belief in The Doctor's inherent righteousness. The Doctor isn't good, The Doctor is Good. He is Goodness. That is what he is. He doesn't have human failings, or if he does they are temporary, because The Doctor is a Time Lord who happens to be a human. In contrast, Moffat has always approached The Doctor as a character who exists within a continuum, a larger universe that just happens to have him within it. The Doctor is most definitely the star of Moffat's Who, same as Davies, but from the beginning The Doctor is defined by his problems and insecurities. Moffat's first episode as showrunner has Eleven having to solve two problems - Amy and Prisoner Zero - he caused. Eleven is a liar and Twelve is a rude rear end in a top hat, and their very human failures are almost always the source of their conflicts. Their issues aren't genocide, but in how they're perceived by others, how they interact with others, how they treat others. Clara decides to try and become The Doctor, because being The Doctor is an attainable goal in Moffat's universe. He's just a madman with a box. The Doctor is a human who happens to be a Time Lord. That RTD/Moffat, DC/Marvel split even filters down to each showrunner's most popular creative decision - The Time War is Crisis on Infinite Earths by another name, a way to reset and eliminate the base property's convoluted and at that point restrictive canon. His run then was more-or-less self-contained even as it referenced or reincorporated its past - which is pretty much post-Crisis DC in a nutshell. In contrast, "The Time of The Doctor" is Moffat reincorporating every element of DW's canon in a glorious bit of fanservice that bends over backward to give its viewers everything they could possibly ever want, an excuse for Moffat to take all of his action figures out and smash them all together for almost two hours. Marvel's original Secret Wars, in other words. The analogy falls apart after that, I'd say - I would call Marvel the "emotional" company in the sense of its creative priorities when writing characters. Like Moffat, DC is absolutely loving obsessed with canon and making all the pieces fit together perfectly, they're just extremely, unbearably BAD at doing so. But some similarities are there. All this is to say that, hoo boy, "The Return of Doctor Mysterio" is a bad loving hour of comic book-based media. I love comics, I've read a whole loving lot of them, and everything this episode tries to do, it does wrong. It's almost impressive. So, superhero media. You can approach things the DC way (focus on making the superhero compelling) or you can approach things the Marvel way (focus on making the person behind the mask compelling). Preferably, you do both, but that's really loving hard - in all honesty, I would say that pretty much only Spider-Man and Batman have been able to consistently pull off that balancing act, by being really really good characters with really really good rogues' galleries and superhero conflicts they've been embroiled in. But you have to do at least one of those things. Either the hero is interesting, or the secret identity is. "Mysterio"...does neither. The Ghost is a laughably terrible superhero. Firstly, his name is really dumb, and his costume looks even worse, with that godawful loving emblem on it. His mask looks ridiculous. With superheroes, aesthetics matter! Most heroes don't wear capes any more, so his outfit looks like a bad throwback. If this sounds like a nitpick, it kind of is, but at the same time it illustrates how little Moffat understands about the modern-day superhero landscape. The very first image we see of The Ghost makes him look like one of the countless Golden Age ripoff Superman that cluttered newstands in the forties. Maybe that was the point, since The Ghost is very very clearly meant to be not-Superman with his powerset. If it was, though, then it was a fundamentally misguided effort, because The Ghost is some weird relic placed in what is ostensibly supposed to be a modern-day, current storyline. It's not a farce, parody, or deconstruction. This is a straight-faced superhero story written by Stephen Moffat, and as soon as the "hero" flies into frame it feels ancient. The "Hello, fellow kids" of superhero stories. It's even worse because there's a plethora of superhero tv shows on the air, from Netflix to the CW to FOX to FX and so on, so if anyone involved in the creation of this episode did even an ounce of homework and watched one they'd understand the current language the medium uses to communicate. Because it's not this. Not at all. And let's talk about The Ghost's powerset. It's both incredibly ill-explained and impossibly broad. Either one of those things in isolation would be bad, but combined they make for nonsensical and terrible storytelling. Superheroes only work in a universe in which they have limitations - even stuff like the Sonic Screwdriver, The Doctor's magic wand, "doesn't do wood". The Doctor is extremely smart and basically immortal, but he's not significantly stronger than anyone else, can't run at super speeds, he can't fly. He can travel through time, but only in his magic box. These restrictions ground The Doctor and place him within a universe that has rules. Conflict arises when his desires grind up against those same limitations. In contrast, what do we know about The Ghost? He can fly, has super strength, super speed, is bulletproof, has x-ray vision, and can seemingly do anything by snapping his fingers - he literally shatters nuclear explosion-proof glass and lights a candle by doing so. If that's his skillset, why doesn't he have super hearing? Why does he need some magical baby monitor with miles-long range for his secret identity? These questions arise because the character, as written, is fundamentally nonsensical. My suspension of disbelief was broken, and in its place my skepticism flooded in. And for a genre that is, at its core, about people dressing up like latex clowns to punch other, differently colored latex clowns, that's a death knell. If the defense is "Well, Moffat clearly modelled The Ghost after Superman", well, my response is simple. Superman is a great superhero, but from an empirical perspective, he actually sort of sucks. During the Golden Age and for much of the Silver Age, he could do basically anything he loving wanted with his powers, and as a result DC has had to introduce a whole bunch of weaknesses to the character. He was too good at everything - gently caress, there's a whole story about how he runs a charity race against The Flash (you know, the guy whose literal sole entire thing is how fast he is) and, if I remember correctly, The Flash barely wins, and only because Superman wasn't going at full speed intentionally. Superman is great, but it's largely in spite of his skillset, not because of it. Introducing The Ghost as a Superman expy is fundamentally unsound, because Superman is a poorly designed superhero that gets a pass due to having a near-century of fantastic stories that make him great, and from being the literal first one. There wasn't a rulebook to go off of when creating Superman, they were making it up as they went along. (There's also the whole "created by two Jewish writers to show an aspirational figure the Jewish community could look to that could and would kick Hitler's rear end", but that's outside the perview of this review.) My point being, that poo poo worked cause it was the 1930s, it doesn't fly in the 2010s. Premiering a hero that's just too powerful for the universe in which they exist makes for really dull, flat storytelling - there is no sense of narrative stakes or tension, because they are just that much better then everyone else. The Ghost is boring, overpowerful, and above all unbearably lame. His costume is stupid, his powers - although vague - are unimpressive, and Justin Chatwin adopts a low-rent Bale Batman impersonation when in costume that does not work at all. The Ghost has no real onscreen charisma, and is in no way an especially compelling character. But that's only half of it. Grant (Justin Chatwin) is even worse. It's clear that Moffat modelled this episode, and Grant specifically, after Superman. But he completely misunderstands why Superman works. The best explanation of Superman and why he's so appealing comes from this Polygon article Justin McElroy wrote explaining why he wasn't seeing Batman versus Superman quote:My earliest superhero memory that I can summon up with any clarity was watching the Richard Donner Superman with my dad, and there’s this amazing shot after Pa Kent dies. It’s Clark standing in a wheat field with Ma Kent talking about how it's time for him to go, to be Superman. My dad, in a not-infrequent moment of poignancy says "People say it’s the yellow sun, but if you want to know where Superman really gets his power, it’s those fields." That's what makes Superman good. That's what makes him powerful, what makes him memorable. What makes him iconic. People ask why Superman even has a secret identity, why he isn't just Superman all the time. And it's simple; he became a hero not for any specific reason, no girl to impress or fame to attain, he did it because it was The Right Thing To Do. The real trick is that Clark Kent isn't Superman's secret identity; Superman is Clark Kent's. Clark is the superhero, the person Kal-El desperately wants to be. The young Kansas farmboy who was raised to be a respectful, nice person. And it's the whole reason Superman works; Kal-El is under no obligation to be a superhero, but he is anyways because it's what Clark Kent would do. And you see it, in Superman's best stories; Clark will "stumble" into someone, "accidentally" pushing them out of oncoming danger, or he'll "cough", releasing a blast of air surreptitiously to prevent someone from falling. The point of it is small, simple actions Clark takes to improve everyones lives constantly, because it's the right thing to do. My favorite Superman story takes that idea - of simple, small acts of kindness - to its logical extreme, a section in the otherwise abysmal Superman: Grounded where he talks down a suicidal jumper. This is Superman, at his very best - an extremely selfless person willing to risk and sacrifice it all to help make one otherwise irrelevant person's day better. Moffat does none of this when establishing or writing Grant. Clark Kent is the most crucial part of Superman's backstory - he has to end up raised by a couple who instill in him good values, and he has to have a more-or-less uneventful childhood, because it makes the juxtaposition of his lack of any inciting tragedy (beyond the death of his father) impress more why it's so incredible that he puts on the cape as an adult. More than anything else, Superman is Superman because it's the right thing to do. He does it just to do it, and there's nothing more noble than that. But Grant isn't written like that. He comes by his powers accidentally, and is tormented by them, especially as a teen. Moffat attempts to give Grant a troubled childhood, with the implication during the intermittent asides placed throughout the episode that his teenage years, especially, were very tough. Essentially, Moffat attempts to turn Superman into Spider-Man - lives in NYC, grew up with his best friend/childhood crush, social outcast growing up, etc. etc. Spider-Man is the ur example of Marvel's creative direction, and fundamentally different from Superman - whereas Superman is good because he wants to be, Spider-Man does good because he has to. Everyone knows Peter Parker's origin - troubled nerd, bitten by spider, wrestling costume, lets criminal flee, Uncle Ben. It crystallizes Spider-Man's backstory into one of guilt, of redemption. Peter does what he does not because he believes in himself - because he doesn't, he's haunted by his own self-doubt - he does it because he has to make up for his first, most important mistake - causing Uncle Ben's death. It's the perfect origin, a simple but effective one - trying to live a life to make up for past failures - and engenders sympathy with the protagonist as a result. It's that drive to atone that readers can comprehend perfectly. In what is, in my opinion, Spider-Man's best story, it puts an extremely fine point on it: In the backup to Fantastic Four #588, Spider-Man consoles a distraught Franklin Richards as he mourns the death of his uncle, Johnny Storm. It's a brilliant encapsulation of what Spider-Man is and how readers view him. We relate to Spider-Man, we empathize with him. We understand him. In some small way, we are him. And that's the central difference between Superman and Spider-Man, between DC and Marvel. Between RTD and Moffat. We all want to be Superman. But we're all Peter Parker. Superman and Spider-Man are two completely opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to the perspective one uses when creating a protagonist, and Moffat attempts to mix both. It's incredibly difficult to near-impossible to mix the two. Superman and Spider-Man are defined by exact opposite motivations - Kindness and Guilt, respectively, and the only example I can think of that tried the Superman/Spider-Man mixture thing is Invincible, and even that only sorta worked for a little while. When Moffat attempts it, Grant comes across as the worst of both worlds. Grant is somehow both boring and kind of creepy. He has no reason to be a superhero, no inciting event that caused him to throw a costume on, so he feels completely out of place in "Mysterio", an hour in which he stars. Where Superman does what he does because he's genuinely nice, Grant, from "Mysterio"'s beginning to its end, feels like a Nice Guy. He engineers the entirety of his life to be around Lucy (Charity Wakefield), from being her live-in nanny to saving her constantly when he's in-costume, so the entirety of the episode comes across as watching some super-powered stalker try to trick a girl into a relationship with him. He's supposed to be a nebbish nerd, I...guess? But he just comes across as a complete and utter loser creepily pining after his employer. He's not compelling when he's in costume, nor is he sympathetic when he's out of it. The audience, however, is supposed to just inherently root for him "getting the girl", as it were, despite there being no compelling reason to be on Grant's side. Grant never comes across as layered, or with motivations beyond "really wants to gently caress Lucy". He barely comes across as human. This problem is exacerbated by "Mysterio"'s structure. The first act, and in short vignettes throughout, we see Grant's backstory and origin. But it's not compelling television in the slightest, because there's just no there there. He's almost entirely a blank slate, and the audience doesn't get any onscreen reason why Grant decides to put on a costume besides "he read a bunch of comic books as a kid". The second and third acts are split between two plots: "The Doctor solving everything" and "Grant/The Ghost and Lucy attempt to...date? I guess?" We barely see any of The Ghost's superheroics, and the Grant/Lucy stuff is loving excruciating because Grant is such a worthless, boring, undeserving character that none of the romantic stuff feels earned or lands in any way. It also sucks because it separates Grant and Lucy from the Actual Plot that's going on for almost its entire duration. It also segments off the Doctor from what is ostensibly the "main" story, so we can't just rely on Capaldi carrying the go-nowhere romance with the sheer strength of his magnetism as Twelve. It feels like an otherwise traditional if sort of boring Doctor Who episode, one wherein Twelve attempts to stop an alien invasion, that happens to have a really bad version of a CW superhero show awkwardly spliced in . "Mysterio" is basically an atonal, boring mess from start to finish, and whenever we cut to whatever Lucy and Grant are doing - especially during their godawful roof date - the momentum comes to such a sudden halt you can hear the screeching. It doesn't help that the dialog is so atrocious throughout. The roof date, with such awful lines as "There aren't too many guys like Grant, either!" or "Not every guy can be a nanny!" are both awful to hear spoken aloud and feel weirdly dissonant in the moment. It seems like the episode wants to put across that Grant is the real superhero, but if that's the case then why give him both such a traditionally feminine job and then make him so overdefensive about it? And why does "Mysterio" constantly use his job as a punchline? If the show wants us to root for him, why does everyone make fun of his job so frequently? Especially when you contrast that with how DW introduced and wrote Rory Williams (another character who worked in a female-dominated profession), it puts into sharper relief how nonsensical and at cross purposes such jokes are. Beyond that, the Grant and Lucy stuff just suck the air out of "Mysterio" throughout, and take up so much screentime the Doctor half suffers as a result. To be clear, the Doctor plot isn't necessarily good, but it has to be abridged so heavily that none of it has space to breathe. It also feels, again, completely separate from the Grant/Lucy stuff, and as a result is a jarring viewing experience. The Doctor stuff isn't great, but it isn't actively bad like all the Grant stuff is and the way Moffat attempts to tie both plots together feel really forced and unearned. The climax feels like a bare excuse for Grant to play the hero, despite not having really done anything to deserve it. The capper consistenting of Lucy falling immediately in love with him as they fly off to bone in space is...a narrative choice, I guess. The most insulting thing about this episode is how good it could have been. As I noted before, there's a lot of similarities between Doctor Who and superhero comics, so marrying the two should work. But the problem lies in Moffat writing a bad superhero and pasting him onto a bad and boring (and kind of creepy) character, so what we get is a bad superhero tv show in the middle of a bad, boring and short episode of Doctor Who. It's not an offensively bad hour, nothing about it reaches the depths of, say, "The Zygon Invasion/Inversion", but it could have and should have been a lot better than it was. The lone bright spots of the hour are Charity Wakefield as Lucy and the entirety of the ending scene with The Doctor and Nardole (Matt Lucas) talking about River Song. But it's all just too little and too late. Comics deserved a better tribute than this. Grade: D Random Thoughts:
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Jul 8, 2017 20:47
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cargohills posted:I feel like an attempt at a British superhero could have been quite funny.  ?Captain Britain, however, actually rules a lot.
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Jul 9, 2017 01:46
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Wolfechu posted:I'll say this about this thread, getting some amazing comic recommendations. Definitely checking out that FF Hickman run. You need a reading list, let me find the post I made about it. It is my bar none favorite run of comics ever, and should be all up on MU. It is also almost entirely self-contained, so all you need to know is at least the loose events of Civil War, the Skrull Invasion, and how that leads into Dark Reign. Burger McAngus posted:For my birthday a buddy of mine gifted me Hickman's run on Fantastic 4 and a year sub to Marvel Unlimited. I liked what I read so I was wondering if, as someone who's only marvel reading was that run, I could jump into Hickman's Avengers/Infinity/Secret Wars stuff or if I'd need a whole bunch of other things to know what's going on. Toxxupation posted:Okay, gently caress. I think I got the loving list down. Toxxupation posted:
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Jul 9, 2017 03:30
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I forgot to mention in the review, but My Hero Academia actually pulls off the "Superman who is also Spider-Man" thing really well. Basically, what I'm saying is watch My Hero Academia.
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Jul 9, 2017 19:54
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End this tangent now, please.
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Jul 10, 2017 17:13
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AndwhatIseeisme posted:So Occ, not to change the subject or anything, but I'm curious about something. You mentioned that you're aware that this season is Moffat and Capaldi's last. So, in light of that knowledge, before you go into the meat of this season, what is your opinion of this change? Excited for the change? Sorry to see them go? Completely indifferent about who's sailing this lovely ship? Let us know. I'm curious if your opinion will change or not after the season is over. Oh I forgot to respond to this. Well, firstly, having shotgunned the entirety of the RTD tenure before watching the Moffat stuff I have to say from an empirical standpoint there's very, very few times where Moffat's episodes sink to the depths that RTD regularly sank to. And from a "Genuinely offensive to the audience's intelligence" standpoint nothing is worse than "The Parting of the Ways", although "The Zygon Inversion" almost gets there by virtue of how just straight-up normally offensive it is. So I always found the Moffat hatred really overblown and frankly, really disingenuous - I saw the RTD stuff, it was regularly really loving bad. Moffat's stuff being sorta repetitive and having some vaguely sexist poo poo in it is not unique to him at all, and I found the bandwagon hatred of Moffat almost always argued in bad faith. The subsequent mean-spirited joy people had that he was leaving always came across as a really lovely thing to think and really ignored the positives Moffat brought to the series. Like, if you honestly argue that Series Five is anything but one of if not the best seasons of Doctor Who, ever, I would say you are either arguing in fundamentally bad faith or aren't actually a fan. Like I cannot envision hating Moffat so much you can't actually acknowledge that Series Five, "The Doctor's Wife", "Listen", "Heaven Sent", "Time of the Doctor"...I could go on, those were literally off the top of my head...aren't among the best stuff this show has produced. So yeah, I'm sad to see him go, but I can fully agree that it seems like it's Moffat's time to leave. Series Nine was mostly abysmal and 1000 was really really bad, so I can see the argument that Moffat's run out of ideas. Like hoo boy, was Series Nine a loving mess. I think I mentioned in the Series Eight finale review that change is fundamental to DW - that it's a fundamental part of what makes this show appealing, that it constantly surprises. I thought (and still think) that this is a mostly-bad (or, more accurately, mostly not good) show that has flashes of true greatness. The change is essential to keeping the show fresh, the uncertainty, so on some level I'm excited to see what the next showrunner brings to the table. And from a selfish perspective it's nice to get another showrunner so I can have reviews dealing with the new showrunner's style over having to bring up Moffat v. RTD a billion more times. That all being said. Chibnall is (mostly) a loving terrible writer on DW and a mostly terrible television writer in general. It's really, really hard - near-impossible, in fact - to be excited that Chibnall's taking the reins when he wrote that loving godawful Silurians two-parter and outside of Broadchurch season one, which itself fell into an awkward repetition within its first season of repeating themes and ideas over and over, everything he's written has been varying shades of bad. As a writer he's mostly bad, as a showrunner he had one good season of a show before the bottom completely fell out - I just don't know. I have zero confidence he can deliver.
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Jul 12, 2017 04:45
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilot_(Doctor_Who) In which https://youtu.be/tyeJ55o3El0
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Jul 15, 2017 02:09
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Doctor Who "The Pilot" Series Ten, Episode One What's most interesting about "The Pilot" is how similar to "Rose" it is. "Rose", of course, being the first episode of the absolutely dire pile of poo poo that is Series One. Moffat's no stranger to taking an idea that RTD originated during his run and updating and/or improving it during his tenure; "Blink", most famously, feels incredibly thematically and structurally similar to "Love and Monsters". But "The Pilot" is near-identical to "Rose": both are Companion introductions that are simultaneously season premieres. The episode opens with an establishing shot of our new Companion, who happen to be Cockney-accented working class women. Both Companions, Rose and Bill (Pearl Mackie), are introduced quickly to The Doctor, and just as quickly resume their altogether regular lives almost immediately afterwards. They investigate the Doctor and his mythos, which in both cases entails looking at old photos that, impossibly, contain the Doctor's face, and he looks exactly the same age in those extremely dated photos as he does presently. They then meet their love interest, who is immediately captured and a weird evil replica is produced, who becomes the main antagonist of the episode. In the climax, the Companion confronts the evil replica, who is revealed to be a sentient fluid that copies the form of other races. The Doctor then yells at the sentient fluid and warns them not to antagonise any further, and the sentient fluid gives up. The soon-to-be Companion then has a heart-to-heart with their love interest, resulting in rejecting the love interest's advances, then the newly crowned Companion boards the TARDIS with The Doctor to begin a whole new season of adventures, at the end of which The Doctor will regenerate into somebody else. It's really kind of bizarre, how close at an almost beat-for-beat level "The Pilot" is to "Rose". I hope somebody besides me has noticed this, because it's honestly sort of weird. As anyone who read my review (my first-ever review) of "Rose" will note, I hated - and still hate - "Rose" with a passion. It's an offensively dumb and misunderstood opening thesis for a reboot of a beloved television franchise, one that starts the show off on the wrongest foot possible. It's a dreary, boring, stupid episode that doesn't establish its Companion, barely establishes The Doctor (and only by having people talk about how great The Doctor is at Rose, over having The Doctor and Rose...you know....interact), and has a really, really stupid monster of the week. Like, among its dumbest, possibly ever, and this is in a season where fat aliens who are defeated by their farts are a bad guy we're supposed to take seriously. It's bad. In contrast, "The Pilot" is a hell of a lot better, bordering on great. The concept of "Rose done right" is one the Who revival has tried to tackle many, many times - Martha, Donna, Amy, and Clara all feel like both RTD and Moffat trying to separate out various aspects of Rose's personality and improve that specific aspect, to mostly-success - only Martha is the real failure of the bunch. But Bill comes across as the most complete redux of Rose and also its most successful. Rose failed for a myriad number of reasons where Bill doesn't; RTD, in his goofy and sort of subconsciously elitist way, tried to create an audience surrogate First Companion who would reflect the common person's viewpoint, but what he ended up making was a...dumb hot blonde who was patiently mansplained to by The Doctor. Rose never feels present within the world as established in Series One, just an excuse to either enable Greatness in The Doctor or to be patronizingly talked down to by the same. Moffat mostly avoids this problem simply by changing the circumstances under which Bill and Twelve meet. Rose was introduced to The Doctor by literally being saved by him, the purest example of "damsel in distress" possible. It immediately wrong-footed our introduction to Rose, because she was presented as inherently subservient to The Doctor. In contrast, Moffat introduces Bill the way most other Companions are: she distinguishes herself to Twelve via her unique combination of skills, who then elects to elevate her to greatness due to her overwhelming level of competence. It's still a fundamentally sexist way to establish a character (considering that a woman only has value in-universe if and when an old white man decides so), but it's the level of sexism that Doctor Who always operates on, because literally every single Doctor has been a white dude. It's an unfortunate part of the form DW takes, and will be so until someone at the BBC wakes up and casts a woman to play The Doctor because, jesus loving christ, how the gently caress has that not happened yet. For all of his supposed adulation of the blue-collar experience and emphasis on the street-level, common-man experience, RTD's Who ended up never feeling connective to the proletariat. This is partially because RTD's vision of "the working class" was skewed; like America, he viewed the white middle class as "the working class", over people of color and various minorities struggling to make rent or living paycheck-to-paycheck. (You can see this in any one of his myriad "Aliens invade Britain" storylines, which inevitably cuts to a shot of some, almost always white, traditionally hetero family with two kids cowering in a corner. It's not really a criticism, but it reflects the assumed normalcy that permeates culture and especially reflects how the moneyed rich view "the working poor"). His Rose, therefore, was fundamentally misguided; I mean, we can look at who was cast to play her. Getting a literal former pop star to play a working class "chav" is difficult to swallow. Bill feels like the working class hero that RTD ostensibly "wanted" Rose to be but never really put in the effort of presenting her as beyond her job and accent. By being black, and by being queer, and by emphasising her food service job so repeatedly in the vignettes during the first act, Moffat believably sells Bill's common-man (or -woman) viewpoint in a way RTD never did. Bill is proudly and specifically a minority in the way Rose never was, and she struggles with things poor people everywhere do. She works serving chips all day because she can't afford tuition to the university she wants to go to. She sneaks into Twelve's lectures because she wants to learn so badly despite not being able to be a student. She has a weirdly tense relationship with her foster mother, who she still lives with, who wants her to focus on her job over her studies. Poor people can't afford idealism. When given the option of free learning, she chases that and succeeds admirably - reflecting how what separates the rich from the poor is a biological lottery, not drive or work ethic or whatever. I'm not gay, I'm not black, I'm not a woman, I'm not even British, but I absolutely see pieces of my life reflected in Bill when I never did with Rose. She, simply put, just works, and it's largely due to Moffat understanding how to present the truthfulness of the working class experience in a way RTD never really could. Most importantly, though, Moffat making Bill gay (or at least queer) means that The Doctor is absolutely off limits as a romantic interest to Bill forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. It's a bit of a crass way of looking at it, but making Bill into girls is not only good for representation, it also means that as a matter of course the audience won't get the loving romance poo poo that sunk Rose so deeply, especially in Series One. Series One was a flaming trash heap for a whole number of different reasons, but it sucked especially badly because RTD substituted "Rose wants to gently caress the Doctor" for any sort of defining character trait. I mean, you could replace a good ninety percent of Rose's lines in Series One with (flirtingly) "Wot do ya mean, Doctah? Oi juss don' geyt it!" and absolutely no clarity would be lost. It's also notable considering one of the best episodes of the season (and only actually competent ones), "Father's Day", is especially good because it forces Rose to have a character trait that isn't her crushing on Nine. Moffat heading all of this off at the pass by making Bill not into what Twelve is bringing to the table forces the writing team, and Moffat specifically, to actually define her character. It already pays dividends in "The Pilot"; Bill is interesting because she's well-written, and she's well-written because there has to be a variance in her interests. Considering how well she comes across here, I'm confident that Bill will continue to be afun Companion moving forward in Series Ten. In case you couldn't tell, I really like Bill, a lot. Beyond her being a Companion I feel like I can specifically identify with, the same way I could identify with Rory Williams (the best Companion) because he was Just a Dude, she's a well-written and generally well-acted character that brings a lot of uniqueness to the table. I'm not one hundred percent sold on Bill just yet - I really hated basically everything about the handholding stuff in the climax. In addition, I wonder if maybe Pearl Mackie isn't a great dramatic actress because, again, I found the handholding scene sort of intolerable. It also didn't help that my one thought during the scene where Bill is sobbing while looking at photos of her dead Mom was "I guess I'm supposed to feel sad about this." On the other hand I felt her confrontation with Twelve post-climax was one of the strongest scenes of the episode, wherein she insists on keeping her memories and not getting them wiped like Amy, Clara, et al. It was a very strong scene that Pearl Mackie sold very well, so perhaps there's just an adjustment period inherent to every new character. I think it's interesting how, in addition to getting a new Companion, we essentially get a new Doctor in Twelve. There's a lot of really intelligent things Moffat does with Twelve in this episode - I enjoy that Twelve has turned from "nearly sociopathic uncaring rear end in a top hat" to "Kindly old dude who can be brutally cutting from time to time". It gives Capaldi's character an implied arc that starts and continues on from Clara's influence on him. He softens and learns his humanity, becomes a actual human being, and he's employing Clara's lessons here. I have a weird love-hate relationship with Clara - largely because a lot of her episodes were very bad and it took a billion zillion episodes to figure out what her character was supposed to be - but it's nice to see that Clara has this huge and really important influence on Twelve in the same way Amy and Rory did on Eleven. It also continues and pays off the overall theme of Twelve's tenure on Who, that of teaching and learning, by making him literally a professor. It also takes some of the sting out of the sexist nature of Bill's onboarding process, because it's Twelve paying it forward - he was essentially "created" by Clara, who taught him the things he needed to succeed and thrive in his current form, and he's continuing her ideas by taking on a student of his own. It's a nice way to close that particular loop. I'm still sort of lukewarm on "The Pilot", however. I think it's largely because its first act is just so good - it employs the best visual effects and feels the most new and original. Unfortunately, as "The Pilot" continues, it sort of falls back into being a traditional episode of Doctor Who, to its slight detriment. I wouldn't say the villain "ruins" "Pilot", like you can say in numerous circumstances when the bad guy shows up in an otherwise fascinating hour, but as soon as she does "Pilot" just turns into "Rose". And this is a problem, not because "Rose" is bad, because it most definitely is and "The Pilot" most definitely isn't, but because above all else "Rose" is an insanely traditional episode of DW. It has all these terrible elements on display and basically segments off Rose and Nine for no loving reason, but it's about a dumb, hackneyed villain who operates mostly as symbolism for something else that chases around the Doctor and his Companion until the villain is defeated, specifically via Doctor-shouting. The first act of "The Pilot", however, intimates this very mundane, sort of sedate introduction to Bill. I wanted to see the version of "Pilot" that's just sixty minutes of Bill living her life and trying to get a girlfriend as maybe she sorta gradually figures out who Twelve really is, as The Doctor swoops and cavorts and lectures his students. That show is much more appealing than the show we actually got. It's especially notable here because, as soon as the antagonist shows up, nothing...really...happens. Twelve and Bill just sorta run away from it and we get the contractually-obligated Dalek appearance (which, more than ever before, sure does feel like Moffat cramming in the BBC-mandated yearly Dalek cameo so they keep the rights and he can get it out of the way early. Boy are they out of place here) during it. It feels so...weightless, so checkboxy. There's some good stuff - namely, Bill's reaction to the TARDIS is actually a fun spin on the skeptical wonder we're used to seeing from every new Companion. But beyond that it's just so by-the-numbers as a Companion intro. Here's Twelve wowing Bill with the TARDIS. Here's him going to somewhere else instaneously. He's him going to somewhen else, also it's an alien world that looks suspiciously like a quarry. Here's a Dalek, and oh boy look it's guys in alien costumes getting killed. Climax, resolution, denoument. Fin. It's not bad, but it's predictable, and it's especially intolerable here since Moffat provides us a glimpse of a much more thematically complex and interesting Companion introduction within those first twenty minutes. But, again, it's not bad, just an episode that retreats from a much braver conceit in favor of a much more traditional one. It's pleasant, and Twelve and especially Bill come off looking especially well from it. There's quibbles I have, like how Twelve's turn from not wanting to use the TARDIS anymore and resume his professor gig/protect whatever the hell is in that vault into the traditional "Gotta go explore the known universe" persona we've come to expect from our Doctors feels really unearned and forced, but, whatever. It's a very decent pilot (ha ha! Thought I wouldn't make the pun, huh?!) for the season, and performs all of its jobs - introducing the Companion, reintroducing the Doctor, pairing them together and giving them a reason to go off on adventures - admirably. And, most importantly, it's "Rose" but not complete and utter loving dogshit. So there's that. Grade: B Random Thoughts:
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Jul 15, 2017 17:24
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I love Bill's hair. I hate the bow. Cause it's loving terrible. It's not even a pretty bow, its some brown colored blob that fucks up the lines of her awesome afro!
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Jul 15, 2017 19:01
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Congrats, dw, for listening to my review, I felt it was very good as well
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Jul 16, 2017 16:49
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I haven't seen the episode yet, so the episode 2 review might be up late (as in, like, tomorrow). Dunno yet.
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Jul 22, 2017 18:34
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile_(Doctor_Who) In which everything is on fleek.
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Jul 23, 2017 04:28
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Doctor Who "Smile" Series Ten, Episode Two "Smile" is frustratingly bad, because it's about two inches away from being good. Great, even. Video games are almost universally terrible at moral conflicts, usually choosing to illustrate them as black or white choices (like in Bioshock's (in)famous "choose whether or not to kill a little girl with your bare hands so you get more superpower juice" Little Sister decisions). When they attempt morally complex dilemmas, there's usually a difficult to obtain but "perfect" third option that nets the player the best possible outcome. It's a symptom of a problem that video game stories have of not willing to, and not being able to, confront the players. The most notable example of this is Mass Effect 3. The end of the game has you, Shepard, choose between destroying the big bad cyclical evil that wants to destroy all sentient life in the universe but in the process also destroying all artificial intelligence (of which there are multiple AI races in the galaxy, many of whom are your friends and co-workers). Or, you can decide to take control of them, but in the process also taking control of (and in the process destroying the agency of) all artificial intelligence in the universe as well. And, again, there are multiple AI races in the universe, many of whom are your friends and co-workers. Leaving aside the tortured way the choice is presented, that itself doesn't really make any sense when one thinks about it (why, exactly, would destroying all the Reapers destroy all the Geth and EDI besides "so you can have a hard choice"?), the choice boils down to a difficult and thus interesting one: Either you can kill all non-organic life in the galaxy, or you can take over it. Genocide or Slavery. Either way, you're a monster, and Shepard commits a horrible act. The problem is that there's a third option, that's only obtainable if you beat the game under a specific set of conditions, wherein Shepard instead chooses to merge all artificial and organic life in the universe, meaning everyone and everything stays alive, the big bad guys no longer exist, everyone's tech still works, everyone keeps their agency, etc. It's the "perfect" third option that completely and utterly falls apart because it doesn't adequately explain what having every organic life merged with artifical life means (in its most laughable shot, it shows an image of an all teched-out leaf on a tree or something. MACHINE TREES!), and doesn't think for one second its broader implications. Forcing every organic life in the universe to become partially artificial, and every artificial life to become partially organic, is a massive infringement upon everyone's agency. It's not significantly better, or really different, from Control/Slavery - you, the player character, decide for a group of sentient individuals without their input, in an irreversible decision. But the game sort of plays off its really ugly and glaring moral failings by pretending everything is perfect in Synthesis, because the player worked really hard for it and deserves to feel good about it, drat it. But it's indicative of a larger unwillingness in video game storytelling to have a position and follow that position through. Regardless of medium, in storytelling you need to honor the stakes of the world and its characters that you have established as that world's writer, even and especially if that means it'll make people "feel bad" about it. If you don't, you're being a spineless coward like the end of ME3, and you end up pissing everyone off anyways. It makes for emotionally dishonest, and therefore not connective, storytelling. (As an aside, this is why my favorite video game of all time - NieR - is my favorite video game of all time. Without going into spoilers, the end of the game has the player character realizing how monstrous of a person they are and making a final choice between being even more monstrous to achieve his goals or trying for at least some level of redemption while paying a heavy price for it, and it's one of the most emotionally effective things I've ever witnessed.) This is the central problem "Smile" has. It has so much good going for it - it's a well acted, beautifully shot hour that has some of the best set design in the series. "Smile" is also, essentially, a bottle episode, which is huge for the first post-onboarding Companion episode. In some ways, the episode right after the Companion introduction is more important, because the "onboarding" ep is given a lot of leeway to be suboptimal. It also doesn't necessarily establish how the Doctor-Companion dynamic works - some of them do, like "Eleventh Hour", where Amy arrives in Who exactly how she'll be for two and a half seasons. In contrast, "Rose" has barely any Doctor-Rose interaction, and the episode immediately following - "The End of the World" - is where the audience begins to see the Nine-Rose stuff take place. Onboarding often has to juggle introducing a Doctor, a Companion, sometimes both, and its main story, and as a result the central relationship this show operates around - The Doctor and his Companion - can be pushed into the background of an intro. Making the very first episode of a new Companion and her Doctor a two-hander means "Smile" can really drill down and establish Bill and Twelve's dynamic, and it succeeds admirably. As far as I can remember, this is the only time the post-onboarding episode had only The Doctor and his Companion in it. Technically speaking, obviously, there's the young boy and the small group of just-unfrozen colony dwellers, but they're collectively a plot device with a pulse. For all intents and purposes, Bill and Twelve are the only people in "Smile". Helped by a crackling script by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, "Smile" sketches both Twelve and Bill as full characters with a very unique relationship. Continuing the theme of Clara's overwhelming influence on Twelve, Twelve and Bill have the most explicit, and traditional, teacher-student relationship on the show. Nine and Rose was a depressed biker and his groupie sort of jetting around so he wouldn't feel so terrible all the time. Ten and Rose was the creepy teacher-student relationship, like the one that ends up with them getting married the instant she graduates while she's seven months pregnant. Ten and Martha was the rebound as that marriage eventually goes sour. Ten and Donna was him and his platonic best friend trying to get their lives back together on an intergalactic road trip. Eleven and Amy was a joker who felt bad for his fuckup trying to fix the person he hosed up. Eleven and Clara was...not a relationship, sorry, they were just two people who happened to be in the same location for like seven episodes or whatever. Twelve and Clara had the big theme of teaching, but it was more back-and-forth, with each influencing the other just as much as they were influenced by the other. Bill and Twelve, on the other hand, are a teacher and his student. All the other Doctors felt like they went exploring with the TARDIS because "He didn't have anything better to do" or "He has an incessant need to adventure" or "He needs to forget or address his problems or failures". Twelve feels like he takes the TARDIS, and Bill, places because he wants to impart a specific lesson to her, so every time they go to somewhere in time or space it feels like a field trip. For her part, Bill comes across as the excessively eager student who wants to accumulate more knowledge just for the sheer joy of accumulating more knowledge, without an ulterior motive. Which basically makes her the only Companion who wanted to do that - Rose was motivated by lust, Martha by nothing because she was badly written, Donna by self-hatred, shame, and entitlement, Amy by trauma, and Clara by expectation and responsibility. Bill is there just to be there, and her purity of purpose is super refreshing. By shedding all excess characters until the third act (which, coincidentally, is when this episode completely falls apart), we get thirty uninterrupted minutes of the Bill and Twelve show, and I've honestly never come so quick to grips with any character on Who as I do with Bill in "Smile". Coming out this hour, I feel like I have a complete understanding of who Bill Potts is and why she does what she does. As a pure episode, "Smile" is also one of its prettiest and most effective. The set design is aces, with the lighting bringing a sort of otherworldly ethereal aspect to everything that makes the introduction of its antagonist all the more jarring. And the robot design is genuinely pretty great - it's tough to pull off Emoji villains but the weird binary portrayal of the robots' emotions come across in the unsettling way "Smile" intends. I think, in isolation, this episode is really well-done. Like, if you were to view this having seen none of Moffat's ouevre, it's an incredibly accomplished episode from an empirical standpoint. Its sets look great, its shots and lighting look great, the villains are interesting and engaging, the dialog is great, the pacing is pretty good. The problem is that if you look at it as the second episode of the sixth season Moffat has showrun, it's a very derivative episode. The bug things are almost exactly the Vashta Nerada, the set design and robot design feels like someone took the sets and robots from "The Girl Who Waited" and updated them for 2017. The name of the episode feels, like "Blink" and "Listen", a one-word action for a biological function that encompasses a horror episode of Who meant to operate as deeper symbolism for something else. There's memetic phrasing and things people normally do that's given a dark edge. I would slam it more if it was written by Moffat, but it's not. Still though, basically every minute of this I felt like it was someone reaching into Moffat's bag of tricks, taking something he has done many many times before, barely changing it, then writing it in. It was good, but it felt so deeply like I had seen literally all of it before somewhere else in Moffat's Who. Then, of course, we get to the climax and resolution, where the episode collapses in on itself completely. There's so many - I hesitate to say unique, because they're all very hoary sci-fi tropes - but they're all interesting ideas that "Smile" presents. There's a question of whether or not the Vardy are being enslaved. There's the reveal that the Vardy were killing people because they misunderstood how human emotion works, which itself ties into the Emoji conceit brilliantly. There's the reveal of the colonists having been cryogenically frozen, of the Vardy immediately and suddenly gaining sentience (or did they always have it?). None of it is at all original, but these ideas are always cool to ruminate on, so they work despite their obviousness. The problem is in the resolution. After about thirty minutes of scene setting and Bill and Twelve joking around, the episode suddenly - and effectively - sets up this massive, ugly confrontation between both the Vardy and the humans where neither side feels wholly in the right or wrong. Twelve has to solve a situation where they're all about to kill each other, as an outgrowth of a fundamental misunderstanding. Basically, it's a moral dilemma with no good options. Either he somehow disables the Vardy, which is essentially lobotomizing a newly-sentient race of creatures, or he lets them kill the humans. Genocide or Control. So the problem is in the punt. His decision to essentially "reset" the Vardy, also making them into a weird native analogy (possibly as a satirization of or commentary on British imperialism?) comes across as a cheat. And that's not even the damning part - The Doctor was presented with an impossible situation, with no good solutions, and he made one that was the least worst possible. It's the Gordian knot, and he cut it in half, which is itself not the problem. Cheaty, sure, but it was a rigged game where the only option was to cheat. As he himself notes, he only wins chess by flipping the table. The problem is that "Smile" presents his solution as a perfect one, that had no moral problems attached to it. Twelve resets the Vardy, smugly grins at everyone while crowing about how much of a loving genius he is, then goes off in his magic telephone box. The issue with this is that if you think about the resolution of "Smile" for even a second, it's pretty loving terrible. I mean, he mind-wiped an entire race of creatures. That's absolutely messed up regardless of whether or not he was right in doing so, and whether or not it was the only option he could make. The flippant, self-satisfied air with which "Smile" treats his choice is really kind of gross and fundamentally misunderstands the implications of his choice, and leaves just as bad a taste in the mouth as Synthesis does in ME3. It sucks from all angles. Twelve just mind-wiped and essentially rewrote an entire sentient race - something he had this huge issue with doing literally one episode prior. The human survivors are essentially cowed into being unable to mourn their dead, because the offenders literally do not remember the murder they committed. If the Vardy are slaves, which "Smile" heavily implies to outright states they are, making them "not slaves" and forgetting that they ever were slaves doesn't make the central offense the humans committed - slavery - suddenly "okay". And if they were slaves, then they had agency (because slavery is the inherent deprivation of agency), which means they were murderers. And you can't explain it away "Well, they were robots and thus lesser than humans" because this massive theme of the episode is The Doctor hectoring Bill for not respecting artificial life as much as organic life. It makes the resolution even more disingenuous then before, because "Smile" bends over loving backwards to make the point that robots and humans are equivalent, then resolves the episode by mind-wiping one so they don't kill the other. Twelve pushing a literal reset button absolves everyone of responsibility while simultaneously refusing to address any difficult questions this episode raises. And, again, this would all be fine if the episode took the tack of "The Doctor had to make a terrible choice (mind-wiping a race) to prevent an even worse one (them killing all the humans)." It's fine to cheat, and it's fine to give a lovely resolution if the media represents that option as lovely. Synthesis sucked as an ending logically speaking in ME3, but it sucked especially because it presented itself as the perfect solution that had no problems attached to it. Which is fundamentally untrue! The Doctor did a bad thing, and whether or not it was necessary or was the least worst option available doesn't make it not a bad thing. It's more frustrating because, as I noted previously, this episode feels so aesthetically similar to "The Girl Who Waited". Which is an episode that ends with The Doctor making a lovely decision that ends up literally killing another human being, that was itself the least worst option available, but at every point after that decision the episode underlines how awful his decision was, even if it was the right one. Rory Williams, The Best Companion Ever of all time, literally says to Eleven "This isn't fair. You're turning me into you." in response to Eleven forcing him to leave old Amy to die. It's an episode that makes you, the viewer, feel lovely after having watched it, because there was no good solution. Eleven did the necessary thing, but it was still wrong, and "Girl Who Waited" never shied away from making sure the viewer understood it. As a result, "Girl Who Waited" is a magnum opus that presents a hard moral question that it answers honestly, and therefore memorably, in comparison to "Smile"'s complete and utter spinelessness, capped with the show attempting to reassure us about how much of an awesome genius Twelve is. It's not offensive in, say, the way "Zygon Invasion/Inversion" or "Kill the Moon" were offensive, wherein those episodes expressed some really malicious and terrible views, but it's still offensive because it's clear nobody actually thought through the implications of the climax. It paints a big happy unearned smile over a really awful thought, sorta like if you tweeted something really loving terrible and ignorant and appended a dumb loving emoji at the end of OH poo poo THIS IS A BRILLIANT EPISODE Grade: D Random Thoughts:
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Jul 23, 2017 05:48
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I reread some of my old LMS reviews and 1) wow they sucked poo poo huh and 2) for all its faults at least DW isn't that.
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Jul 24, 2017 05:42
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If Moffat was speaking in context as a writer, which it sounds like he was, then he's 100% right. As someone else noted, it sounds like its basically my complaint, just soundbited to be as misleadingly offensive as possible. The English language sucks for third person gender neutral pronouns; speaking as someone who has written a lot, and thought about this even more, they/their reads as repetitive and ugly on the page. It makes the prose you're writing weaker and more flavorless. He and she are strong pronouns that also fade into the background (the mark of a good pronoun is how well it flows in prose, which is why stuff like "whom" has faded in usage. Grammar has even expanded the coverage of "who" to the point where "who" can more or less be substituted in the place of "whom" in most circumstances, and its largely due to the fact that modern language views whom as an outdated and unnaturally pretentious word. If you use the word in your writing, even correctly, it often makes the writing feel full of itself or elitist. And that's just one example. They/their are definitionally vague words, so it makes your writing feel obtuse and unclear, and when used repeatedly can make prose come across as super weak. The gendered personal pronouns don't have this problem; he/she, his/her, etc are very direct and express thoughts simply and clearly. I'm already sorta dreading writing about Thirteen, because I write about The Doctor a ton. I write about The Doctor's mythos, or his quirks, or his history, and often contrast his belief systems and approaches in general to that specific incarnation's. Look at how many gendered pronouns I just used when writing about The Doctor in a two sentence paragraph. Blow that out over a three thousand or more word review, and there's just no easy solution. They and their read as ugly, boring, samey, and vague. "His/her" is possibly the worst solution the English language has come up with, it is one of the most awkwardly constructed phrases ever. Switching between he and she is a good idea in theory that fails because it obfuscates large sections of text and makes it unclear who the writer is writing about, defeating...the entire purpose of using a pronoun. Using proper names/titles can make writing come across as choppy, ugly, repetitive, or unintelligent. Gender neutral pronouns (like Xe and Xer) have not caught on to general use and can make your text feel like its trying to make a specific point, sorta like what Los Feliz Daycare parodies on twitter. I am not using the word "it" to refer to another human being, I don't care what nonbinary people on Tumblr prefer, the word has insanely bad negative connotations in regards to trans people and it's basically a slur. So yeah, there's just no easy out, and I totally share Moffat's frustrations. I'll probably switch to they and their next season, but I won't like it and I already know it'll make my writing read worse. It's pretty loving annoying. NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Jul 25, 2017 |
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Jul 25, 2017 00:12
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Jerusalem posted:Hey guys, there's a general Who discussion thread for this type of stuff, please. gently caress you dad But yeah you're right, I just wanted to get my grievances with how much the English language sucks vis a vis pronouns off my chest.
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Jul 25, 2017 00:14
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I may or may not be playing Pyre obsessively, so the review may or may not be late.
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Jul 29, 2017 02:32
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Jerusalem posted:I don't know anything about it beyond the people who made Bastion and Transistor made it, and I really enjoyed both those games so I'd probably enjoy this one too. It's probably their best game although I have Some Issues with the ending.
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Jul 30, 2017 19:42
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Review will be up today, this I promise.
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Jul 31, 2017 17:03
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all-Rush mixtape posted:Have you watched S36E03 yet, though? Not when I wrote it. However...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_Ice_(Doctor_Who) In which Toxx thought of like fifteen different "thin ice" and "fishy" puns before deciding to embed a Foreigner song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjwV5w0IrcA
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Aug 1, 2017 02:48
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Doctor Who "Thin Ice" Series Ten, Episode Three So, I guess Series Ten is meant to be a soft reboot for Doctor Who, in the same way that Series Five was. In Series Five's case, however, it was a decision that made a lot of sense; after four to five years of stewardship under RTD, who himself rebooted DW with Series One and the Time War, Moffat takes over showrunning duties. He changes virtually everything about the program, from the person who played the titular role down to stuff like the video quality, giving the entire production a modern, vibrant look that ages far, far better than anything RTD made. DW turns from a no-budget British children's TV show to a low-budget cable drama, with a far larger emphasis on serialized storylines, seasons-long arcs, and the sort of televistic outlook pioneered by American television during the mid-2000s. DW was a distinctly different beast under Moffat, so it made sense when he soft rebooted it. Nearly every single element of RTD's Who is not present in Moffat's in Series Five, so Moffat's decision to treat that season as an onboarding point for new viewers makes sense. It's a clean break, so as a matter of course having Eleven explain to Amy his whole deal, the tried-and-true "new Companion interacting with new Doctor" stuff, the "Companion goes to distant past and far future" episodes after her onboarding, and so on - it feels necessary. There is a brand new showrunner, Doctor, and Companion(s), and we haven't had that trio since RTD first took the helm during a season that itself was a reboot. So the repetition of the themes and leitmotifs that define Doctor Who feels necessary, and earned, in addition to the fact that we're seeing these base concepts through the lens of Moffat's influence, in direct counterpoint to RTD's. The entire notion feels exciting because it's new, because it's a different perspective than what we're used to. And, therefore, it's engrossing, even if the underlying ideas are themselves tired. I don't know why exactly they're doing it here in Series Ten. It feels completely superfluous and I have zero idea why Moffat et al felt the need to treat Series Ten as a wholly new thing. It feels like a gimmick that wasn't thought through at all, sorta like how Series Nine was inexplicably and unnecessarily the season of (mostly bad) two-parters. Like, who is the reboot for, exactly? I know that in the timeline of the production of DW, it's been a little over a year since the last DW episode aired, which was itself a bad Christmas special. So on some level I sort of, kind of get approaching Series Ten with the perspective that maybe the audience has gone away, or doesn't exactly remember how DW "works" (even though, to be honest, it's got one of the simplest high-concepts for a TV show ever - "Alien in magic box solves problems in the universe with spunky lady by his side"), but on the other hand everyone who's watching DW is watching it for the long haul. From what I understand, DW is basically Britain's version of Star Trek in America in the sense of its memetic influence on the culture of the country. Like, you may hate DW as a Brit, you may have never seen an episode, but it's so deeply and specifically a British production that you've attained a knowledge via osmosis of what DW is, the exact same way every American knows what Star Trek is. I do not think I've literally ever seen an episode of Star Trek outside of some episodes of Enterprise as a teen, which I don't remember, but I could hum to you a couple of bars of its most iconic theme, its general conceit, name off a bunch of major actors and most Starfleet Captains, tell you the structure of most episodes, and so on. It's a part of the fabric of American society in, I assume, the exact same way DW is a part of Britain's. So again, I ask: Who is this soft reboot for? Who does this benefit? British people have specific cultural knowledge of DW, and if this was a move to pander to/get new American viewers I don't see why. It airs on a cable network that isn't in most packages, in the high hundreds, that itself isn't insanely popular. I mean, it's a decent audience in America, don't get me wrong, but from all of my impressions of who American DW fans are they're either diehards or part of the generation who is internet-fluent. Onboarding and soft reboots aren't necessary for those people because there's about a billion different ways (Netflix, most notably) to catch up on the backlog, and that's how that subsection of people consume television nowadays. They browse wikis, bingewatch through any of a myriad number of streaming services, and read AV Club reviews. That's how television is consumed now, especially by the people who DW most appeals to - Millennial or younger people who grew up with the internet. It's not Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead or any of a myriad number of CBS procedurals, DW hasn't penetrated the American zeitgeist in the way that those other shows do where everyone watches them, so this idea of marketing Series Ten - whose most notable new addition is a gay Companion, which doesn't exactly grab headlines - as a way for new viewers to get interested in the program is both puzzling and bizarre. It makes the least sense because of Twelve. If there was a new person playing The Doctor, if Capaldi had regenerated in Series Nine, okay, this reboot perspective would be at least somewhat justifiable. But it's not, and presenting Series Ten as a great way for new viewers to be interested in DW all over again is incredibly disingenuous because this is the end of Twelve's story. Twelve is in his third act, closing out his time on Who. His personality has gone from "insufferable prick" to "wise old mentor", and that personality change and how it's happened is the best throughline of Capaldi's time on the show. Jumping in now, where his arcing is ending, without seeing Twelve go through that change, robs it of its impact. Twelve is an interesting character because Capaldi is a great actor, but Series Ten Twelve becomes something special when you see what he does through the lens of Clara's influence on him. Without it, he's a sort of vaguely interesting but cliched mentor character, which itself looks kinda sexist and/or racist when viewed in the context of him constantly mansplaining to a woman of color how everything works because she just doesn't get it. The context is what makes Series Ten Twelve so delightful, and you don't get that if this is your first season watching DW. So, again: Who is this soft reboot for? I wouldn't be complaining about this so much if it already feels like the season has been so hamstrung by its bizarre insistence to be an onboarding point for new viewers. "Thin Ice", in the abstract, in a solely empirical sense, is a good episode of DW. But I found it boring and repetitive simply because every single moment of it felt like it was treading similar ground to stuff DW, and Moffat specifically, had done before. This was a trend started by "The Pilot" and continued with "Smile", where "The Pilot" feels like "Rose" redux and "Smile", most egregiously, feels like a grab bag of every single horror-episode Moffat had written in addition to being incredibly thematically and aesthetically similar to "The Girl Who Waited", whose climax it (ineptly) cribbed. "Thin Ice" comes across as "The Beast Below" Mark II with typical "new Companion can't deal with The Doctor being an alien" drama thrown in. So we get the monster of the episode beng some sort of enslaved gigantic sea creature who is somehow being tortured to manufacture energy for some version of Britain, whether space or past, and the episode boiling down to a climactic moralistic choice by the Companion that ends up "saving" The Doctor. And, to be clear, none of it is bad. It's actually quite good; the highlight of "Ice" is in its first act when Bill confronts The Doctor about his seeming careless disregard for the loss of human life. The Doctor's response of him not being afforded the "time" to be outraged doesn't come across as either an excuse, justification, shield, or lie, but as more of a pragmatic reality of his function within the universe of Who. This question of The Doctor's insensitivity towards the dead has been brought up many times, but with Twelve it's the first time his uncaring nature doesn't feel like a defense. It plays into the concept of "The Doctor as overt teacher", where he recognizes and absorbs the awful truth of what's happening without it paralyzing him, but doesn't cheapen Bill in exchange. Her line later on of having "moved on", combined with Twelve's wondrous speech when captured by Sutcliffe (Nicholas Burns) about the value of a human being in how they treat the smallest and most unimportant life, makes their confrontation a rarity in Doctor/Companion arguments - neither side is wrong, but they both value the perspective and empathy inherent in the other's viewpoints. I feel, more and more, like I'm turning into the worst sort of DW fan, the awful pedantic oval office who can't stop endlessly whining about how "X did it better" or "Y is just Z but different". But, I can't ignore my feelings about this season so far and "Thin Ice' in specific; it all comes across as very repetitive and samey, and even when it's good it feels good because its either an echo or callback to something I've already seen, marginally improved. So even though Pearl Mackie is fantastic as Bill - and, boy oh boy, is she, Mackie is loving crushing it - and Capaldi is wondrous as Twelve and Sarah Dollard's script is pretty great, it just all felt so very similar to what I've seen before on Moffat's Who. I come to Who, as I've mentioned in the "Last Christmas" review, not because it's good, and not because it's consistently good. Because it most certainly isn't either. I come to Who to be surprised, whether or not that surprise is good or bad. I come for daring, interesting, and new television. I come for the originality, even and especially when that originality completely fails to coalesce into something watchable. So Moffat taking the, in my opinion, completely unneeded tack of reintroducing a bunch of concepts DW has gone over a million times before under the pretense of it being a "soft reboot" is exactly what I don't want. It's also not helped by the episodes so far feeling like various writers took old Moffat scripts and changed some words around until they wrote a new one. Maybe if DW ran for American network TV show seasons, maybe if I didn't know for a certainty that Chibnall was taking over next season and going to do this entire loving "soft reboot" song and dance all over again, maybe if the episodes themselves didn't feel, at least to me, so very similar to previous Moffat and DW episodes, both in aim and in execution. But as it stands we're a quarter of the way through Moffat's final season ever on DW and it all feels like poo poo I've seen before, slightly repackaged to look just different enough so it can be sold to the, I suspect, fantasy audience that is "new viewers". This is not what I wanted from your final act, Moffat. I wanted a magnum opus and I'm getting a reunion tour, and playing all the greatest hits all over again just seeks to impress on me how old Moffat Who looks now. Grade: B Random Thoughts:
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Aug 1, 2017 02:58
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idonotlikepeas posted:
You fuckin' son of a bitch idiot. Go away. I liked it better when you were gone, and not here. NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Aug 1, 2017 |
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Aug 1, 2017 05:11
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock_Knock_(Doctor_Who) In which this episode's title doesn't really make any loving sense whatsoever, in retrospect.
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Aug 7, 2017 04:51
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Also, just fyi: you are going to either want to have seen or be indifferent to the spoiling of episode 302 of Black Mirror, "Playtest". I am going to spoil the ever-loving poo poo out of "Playtest" in this next review. In case you don't know what BM is, its a British sci-fi show - weird, right - that like, if you're a DW fan you will probably at least like. Every episode of BM is on Netflix, and its also an anthology show so you can just skip to that specific episode and watch it if you, again, care about not being spoiled. Cheers.
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Aug 7, 2017 04:56
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Doctor Who "Knock Knock" Series Ten, Episode Four "Knock Knock" most likely would have been a better episode if Charlie Brooker had written it. Charlie Brooker is, of course, the creator/star of Screenwipe, which is basically a show where he rants about television he doesn't like. He also, more famously, and more relevantly for this thread, is the creator and main writer of Black Mirror. BM, for those who don't know what it is, is a British sci-fi anthology show (sound familiar?) that has attained a sort of cult following in the US. What's most fascinating is how closely it resembles, and yet is fundamentally different from, Doctor Who. Brooker is a gigantic DW fan, which is somewhat surprising if you follow either his onscreen persona or his written output on Black Mirror. He's a very cynical, fatalistic person - or at least, he presents himself as such - and his BM material is, to put it lightly, pretty loving dark. For instance, the first episode of Black Mirror revolves around the Prime Minister being blackmailed into loving a live pig in order to save a woman's life. (Fun fact: this episode aired like five years before the real Prime Minister was revealed to have done a similar thing in college as a prank.) It's that sort of show. I'm a huge Black Mirror fan - probably a bigger one than I am a DW fan, if I'm being honest. BM is a very technocentric show - most episodes deal in and around the idea of technology's place in society, and either addresses the role tech plays in our current culture and how it has changed as a result of that influence, or uses future tech that is roughly five minutes out from now. It's not grand, swooping future tech that DW likes to employ - most recently, in an episode like "Smile" - but iterations on ideas already in place right now. It nails that balance of being futuristic, but not so much that it becomes fantasy. Like the old meme about the show goes, "What if phones but too much". The irony of the implicit criticism - it's an accurate summation, to be clear, although originated by a critic who hates the program - is that BM is not actually a show that hectors its audience about the dangers of a technocratic future or whatever. BM is a surprisingly human show; it uses its technology trappings to relate to its protagonists, to paint them as full featured, flawed humans. It's much, much darker than DW - episodes often end with pretty horrifying, inhumane things being done to or done by its stars - but it almost never fails to present them as actual people. Essentially, to me, BM is what Doctor Who would be like if The Doctor never showed up. It's an interesting thought experiment; so much of DW is structured around its titular character, so without him what would Doctor Who be like? Well, it'd be a darker, desperate, sadder show. Much hay has been made about how DW is an ultimately optimistic program, but it should be noted that The Doctor and his hangers-on are the prime source of that optimism. They save the day, they right what's wrong, they are the moral protectorates we rely on when we are at our most desperate. Without them, and him, what is the world like? BM contends that it's a more selfish, cruel, and self-serving one. That the technology that often runs rampant in a typical of Who only to be stopped in time by The Doctor just...wins in Black Mirror, becomes the new reality, a grayer and more depressing one. But it's also much more human. The Doctor sucks all the air out of a typical episode of Who, and the structure of the show demands it focus on him. Without a strong central character who is the show's lynchpin, Black Mirror is able to create much more fully featured players than those who exist on DW. Due to being an anthology show, there is no permanence from episode to episode, and unlike, say, certain episodes of The Twilight Zone, very few hours of BM can or do work as thought experiments. The best episodes of BM, not coincidentally, take an outlandish premise and are able to make it meaningful by viewing it through the prism of well-written, empathetic characters. The humanity of its stars are and always have been the focus of BM, and it is what makes the show work as well as it does. Which brings us to "Tick Tock". What's most surprising about "Tick Tock" is how closely it structurally and thematically resembles an episode of Black Mirror from last season, which aired only about half a year or so ago. That episode was "Playtest", episode 302. (A very quick summation of "Playtest" for those who don't know: an American tourist ends up stranded in London after backpacking around the world. After telling his one night stand what happened, she recommends that he work as a playtester for a new video game company to make some quick money so he can get home. He decides to take her up on it, and is quickly placed into a VR video game that scans his brain and creates a handcrafted horror game based off his greatest fears. Bad Things Happen, and he dies as a result of it.) Both "Knock Knock" and "Playtest" are, essentially, haunted mansion horror shows that end up revealing themselves to be, in their final acts, about a male character confronting and finally making peace with his fractured relationship with his mother. Where "Knock Knock" fails and "Playtest" succeeds is in how they structure the final reveal. In "Playtest"'s case, there is a constant running throughline throughout the episode of the main character having an unclear, but strained, relationship with his mother. Gradually, throughout the episode, the viewer learns that he went on this backpacking trip because his father had recently died, and he wasn't emotionally available to help his mother through her grieving process. He turns off the phone whenever she calls and attempts to deflect questions about why he's ignoring her in the beginning, only to gradually open up more and more as the episode progresses. It creates this neat, quiet runner throughout the episode that explains and justifies his more irrational behavior, like his quiet desperation to use basically any tactic that isn't calling his mom for help to make money. He feels a deep sense of shame for the way he's neglected his only living parent through a difficult time in her life when she really needs him. It makes sense. It also heightens the haunted house portions. He starts explaining to this anonymous voice in his head, his only connection to the real world, his difficulties with his mom and allows us to understand if not necessarily condone the actions he took to be in that place. He, over the course of the episode, ends up painting himself as this very flawed dude who did some really lovely things, especially to his mom, and it allows the viewer to empathize with the character. It's what makes the climax of "Playtest" as effective as it is. After a long series of fakeouts - where he, eventually, ends up unsure if he's in the real world or not, the owner of the company ends up personally apologizing to him and books him on the next plane home. He rushes back home, where it's revealed that...his mom has severe, late-stage dementia, and is unaware that he's even been gone and seems to be unsure of whether or not her husband is alive. It's the final gutpunch of the episode, as it all comes together to reveal that the main character was not only neglecting his grieving mother, but leaving a mentally addled woman alone just so he could escape his responsibilities and feelings. Then there's another fakeout where it's revealed that he never actually went home, but basically suffered a massive embolism as the video game was starting up, triggered by his mother calling him at the exact time it was beginning. It doesn't really matter how and why it happens, but the not-very-subtle point Brooker tries to make is how, in an episode all about this guy confronting his greatest fears, that fear wasn't spiders or a haunted house or not knowing if your reality is real or not or even being left alone, but instead his greatest fear was having to talk to his mom. It's compounded by the obvious dramatic irony of the source of his death being the one thing he'd been stringently ignoring for the duration of "Playtest" - a call from his mother. Essentially, "Playtest" builds this very crazy premise - VR that can scan your mind to make bespoke video games that will scare you forever! - and ends up having its resolution be this very simple, very human story about how difficult it is to deal with grief, or to talk to your parents (especially when your parents in question are losing their mental faculties), and how responsibility can be this overwhelming, terrifying thing. There's a lot "Playtest" doesn't do right, but to me it utterly nails the emotional throughline that is the backbone of the hour. "Playtest" is a very divisive episode amongst the BM fandom, with most criticizing the unsympathetic and dislikeable protagonist and uninteresting premise. To me, that's more the point of the thing - the main character is supposed to be a lovely, unlikeable dude and the plot of "Playtest" is specifically an inversion of its high concept. He's a guy who left his dementia-ridden mother alone to go backpacking across the world to avoid a difficult conversation, he's not supposed to be a good guy, and the idea of the "greatest fears" is merely a framing device to force its climax, which after an hour of jump scares and a dude being terrified comes across as the endpoint of a hero's journey. You get a lovely dude becoming marginally less lovely by doing what he should've done in the first place, and even if none of it actually happened, it happened to him, and that's all that matters. He dies anyway, because that's how Black Mirror works, but the climax is meant to express his humanity and make you feel like he's improved himself at least slightly. In contrast, "Knock Knock" lacks that progression. The Landlord (David Suchet), although excellently cast and even more excellently acted, is a weird, creepy villain for the majority of "Knock"'s runtime until minutes before its climax. And that's kind of all he is, so it makes the third act twist reveal - that he's been doing it for his wood daughter, who's actually his mother - land shallower than it should have. "Knock" is an hour devoted to its premise for the majority of its runtime, and doesn't build the emotional throughline of the Landord doing all this for his mother well enough. The twists are stacked too closely together and appear too suddenly for it to feel resonant. "Knock", if it wanted the viewing audience to build sympathy with the Landlord - or, at least, if it want to lay the groundwork for its reveal to happen - needed to spend time throughout the episode of hinting at the Landlord's backstory, to have him reference a daughter or mother who died, and so on. I also think the reveal that "She is his daughter, no wait, she's his mother" is unnecessary complication to an already sort of out of nowhere twist that doesn't serve the story at all. If I wrote "Knock Knock", I'd have given the Landlord a big scene early on where he relates that the building was his childhood home, that the tower was the location where his mother died when he was a child, and that he doesn't want people going there because the memories are too affecting. It would give "Knock"'s climax resonance as the completion of a thought introduced from its beginning, as opposed to this third act series of reveals that feel, well, pulled out of loving nowhere. It also doesn't help that the Landlord is written so blatantly and flatly as a one-dimensional (if engrossing to watch onscreen due to David Suchet's talent) villain. The climax wants the audience to build sympathy or at least empathy with him, and it almost works. But, it fails in the clutch due to the Landlord being this horrible creepy horror movie monster, going around and (seemingly) sacrificing a bunch of multicultural teens to a monster house that he's obssessed with. The climax relies on working only if the audience cares emotionally for the Landlord, and we don't because we can't. I mean, his literal name in the episode is "Landlord". That's it. That's all the audience gets. It underlines how, for a good 95% of "Knock"'s runtime, all the Landlord is supposed to be is the antagonist. This is another situation where "Playtest" nails a conceit much, much better than "Knock Knock" does. The protagonist of that episode is basically its only character in it for a good half of its runtime, basically from when the...playtest starts to after the climax. Even before then, "Playtest" is a one-hander that happens to have a lot of incidental background characters within it. The story is, and centers around, the tourist and his own quirks, so the audience is able to understand his personality fully to make the climax as effective as it is. It also doesn't shy away from making its star lovely - again, he ran away from his demented mother to gently caress around and go backpacking - but it stops short of making him a monster, or a villain. Therefore, the moment when he goes home and meets his mom, even if it's not real, ends up emotional fulfillment of the groundwork laid before. It's a complete arc, and an earned one, in contrast to the Landlord's in "Knock Knock". The essence of "Knock Knock", like in "Playtest", is framing a haunted house story to try and reveal a deeper emotional truth about one of its characters in its climax. I think "Knock Knock"'s climax is successful - despite everything, I almost started tearing up over the reveal that the wood nymph is his mother, and especially adored the final shot of both mother and son being eaten by the wood creatures as they embraced. But it should have been a lot better, and I can't deny the fact that just because it affected me doesn't mean it was, empirically speaking, effective. At least, not as effective as it would have been if the twist was something built to prior, over dropped sort of out of nowhere five minutes before the episode end. "Playtest" also wildly succeeds in tying its premise together with its emotional finale. This is the Charlie Brooker special, of course, but I think "Playtest" really wildly succeeds in this style of storytelling - basically, everything about "Playtest" builds on and helps itself so when its climax hits, it's a point in which all disparate paths converge. Moffat loves "puzzlebox" stories, as has been noted time and again, but if I were to describe how Brooker loves to write, it's like a pyramid. His self-contained stories lay out the ground rules, then build on those ground rules, helped by the character storylines within the ground rules, so it focuses and focuses as the story goes on to have one singular moment - at the top - that's meant to land solely because of what came before. So, with "Playtest", he uses the conceit of the episode to underline its central theme. Video games are escapism, and they have no consequence. The main character is an escapist who has fleed his responsibilities, and is given an ostensible dream job - a video game tester, to play into his personal arc of being an adult in arrested development who wants to take the easiest path away from conflict. He's then forced into a situation where he's stuck in one location, in a personal hell of his own making - remember, the game "scans your brain" to create a personalized horror experience - in a literal prison of the mind. The scariest thing for a person trying to escape his own thoughts and feelings is being forced to confront them, and that's where the majority of this episode takes place. It's why I find the final twist acceptable even if it's a bit of a cheat, because it underlines the idea of the game creating his "greatest fear". His mom - specifically, speaking to and facing the reality of his mother's illness - is his greatest fear. And he comes to a deeper personal realization as a result of it. It's sort of cliche, and takes a few narratively weak steps to get there, but the entirety of "Playtest" builds to that specific moment, and when watching the episode again in retrospect one realizes that Charlie Brooker had assembled the entire episode, on every personal, thematic, and structural level, to get there. There is no chaff, and even if there's some weak moments along the way, it feels like the completion of a thought. "Knock Knock" doesn't really have any of that. Its antagonist, beyond the Landlord, are creepy bugs that have no greater thematic or symbolic meaning within the story beyond "creepy bugs that a young boy would find". I guess they're supposed to represent his Guilt, but the analogy doesn't feel complete. "Knock" seems set in a house because the episode needed a reason to keep all of its characters in one location with no chance of escape. I think it would've worked just fine set on, say, a boat, or an island, or any remote location where other people couldn't get to. There's no real sense of cohesion to the thing, especially in direct comparison to "Playtest". And that's fine, except for the fact that its climax, feels so tonally and thematically dissimilar to what came before. The framing device of "Knock Knock" is just that- a framing device, and as a result one feels like they're watching a typical spooky haunted house story that inexplicably becomes this deep interpersonal story about the relationship between mothers and sons out of nowhere in its last five minutes, and thus is further weakened by its lack of flow. Basically, I find "Knock Knock" to be fine. No, really. I liked it well enough when I first watched it, and still feel pretty positive on it all told. But it's an hour that's missing a lot of narrative flow and doesn't do right by the character that is ostensibly its most important in the Landlord, and as a result the climax does not succeed as well as it could have. The climax, especially, sort of starts to fall apart under even the slightest introspection, and that's largely due to the fact that it's not built to or serves as earned payoff for anything that really came before. If I were to be honest, "Knock Knock"'s central failing is in its attempts to be a story about the Landlord, in the show Doctor Who. Remember when I mentioned how BM feels like what DW would be like if the Doctor never showed up? I think "Knock"'s largest failure can be attributed to that. This specific episode WANTS to be about the Landlord, but the Landlord isn't the Doctor, and Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie as a matter of course are the focus of the show. It also doesn't help that all of Bill's roommates, being connected to Bill, being connected to the Doctor, get a lot of onscreen focus as well, so the Landlord gets pushed further and further to the side as "Knock" focuses on stuff that isn't him. And because the star of Doctor Who is, well, the Doctor, we end up having to see the events of "Knock" through his perspective, which paints the Landlord as a one-dimensional, if supremely well acted, villain. It's this cascading effect where the show simply runs out of time or space to make the Landlord into a real person, and as a result has a climax that at least slightly fizzles. It's why I think this episode would've been so much better if written by Charlie Brooker; not just because he's a very good writer, but to me his defining feature as a writer is exposing the hidden, deep humanity baked into every one of his characters, so you care about them even and especially if they're monsters. This episode's climax demanded I do so for the Landlord, and I still kinda did - but I absolutely could have cared more, if "Knock Knock" were more cohesive. That's basically "Knock Knock"; it's not bad, it's actually fairly good in a lot of different ways, but it could've been a lot better. It suffers especially due to the direct, accidental juxtaposition between it and "Playtest". They're incredibly similar episodes with incredibly similar aims - haunted house stories that end up actually being about a lovely dude's strange and strained relationship with his mother, with the climax consisting of him finally confronting and being honest with her before summarily dying. It's just that "Playtest" does it a lot better, and feels like a much more complete thought than "Knock Knock". And that's even with the caveat that I think "Playtest" still has some pretty glaring issues. Grade: B Random Thoughts:
NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Aug 8, 2017 |
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Aug 8, 2017 04:16
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Doctor Spaceman posted:In Playtest the idea that the game would show him his greatest fears is itself a product of his imagination, since the scenes where he is introduced to the game never actually happen in reality. He doesn't go into a game that creates his worst nightmare, he imagines a game that makes him imagine his worst nightmare. Oh man I forgot about that. Yeah, "Playtest" is way too loving convoluted for its own good. I think my review still stands though.
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Aug 8, 2017 04:48
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_(Doctor_Who) In which The Doctor becomes a socialist. Welcome!
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Aug 16, 2017 02:30
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If you don't want to read Toxx's Far Left Socialist Views maybe skip to the next review
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Aug 16, 2017 02:42
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Doctor Who "Oxygen" Series Ten, Episode Five With "Oxygen" Jamie Mathieson might, legit, be my favorite writer for Who. Doctor Who has been political before, but it's usually either clumsy or avoidable commentary. And this makes sense, considering that DW is a television show created for mass consumption and specifically targeted to kids. So, on one hand, due to marketing forces it has imperative to be as inoffensive, and therefore as apolitical, as possible, and on the other due to its target audience most writers try and avoid making nuanced points out of fear that it'll be pointless and ineffective. Why bother trying to write interesting commentary if it won't land with most viewers? So it's where we get the usual mode DW operates in. Its commentary is often super generic optimism laced with idealism; typical, sort of toothless "up with people, everyone deserves respect, kumbaya" statements. Which are accurate, but by definition feel so generic they lack any point or bite. And, to be clear, that's fine, it's not really what I come to DW for. I have my political beliefs, and they're very strongly held, but I don't need that reflected in every single piece of media I see. Speaking personally, I'm so far left of center nowadays that seeing media that speaks to me is sort of a pointless endeavor in the first place. So when DW does "political stuff", it almost never does anything for me except when it's genuinely offensive. Either all the edges are sanded down, or it's RTD-brand "political commentary" where its so awkward and obvious that it's just loving embarrassing, and so poorly written that it often accidentally undercuts or betrays its own stated premise - "Voyage of the Damned" is a great example of this, where it ostensibly tries to be an argument in favor of sexual equality but is so loving badly written that it ends up being insanely homophobic. Or, it's basically anything Peter Harness writes. That's the other version of political commentary DW presents; genuinely enraging, regressive bullshit that is so cloyingly written and covert that it ends up insidiously, maliciously offensive, where it's Harness attempting to poison people's thoughts with his awful opinions. Where he and writers like him use the nature of DW, and it being aimed at kids, and it being this huge tentpole of British media, and leverages that to subtly inject their beliefs. Essentially, coded dogwhistle bullshit. And, in Harness' case, it's just good enough to work - "Kill the Moon" and "Zygon Inversion" are just decent enough, just well acted enough, just well constructed enough that they might come across as entertaining. They only become terrible if one really thinks about what they just watched, and expecting everyone to critically analyze the media they consume is completely unreasonable. Speaking as someone who's done it for almost a decade at this point, TV shouldn't be viewed as homework to the vast majority of viewers. In any case, "Oxygen" is such a breath of fresh air - sorry - in comparison to the typical "political" episode of Who. I mean, let's be clear - I'm very biased. I'm a far-left socialist who believes that capitalism is, essentially, the most evil human invention currently in existence. So "Oxygen", on some fundamental level, is exactly what I want out of political Who. But I think, even beyond that, "Oxygen" is an incredibly effective episode, and the blueprint for how commentary episodes of DW can and should work in the future. There is an expectation that commentary, especially political commentary, in artistic media needs to be subtle and covert to work, because otherwise it's "pushing your ideology down other people's throats" or so blatant as to be ineffective. This is not true. Although there are great works of commentary that are themselves subtle, covert, nuanced, and quietly effective - Watchmen, for instance, is a great example of criticism of 80s Cold War ideologies and the Reagan administration in general - there are just as many if not more that are blatant in their statements. Animal Farm is literally just a history of post-Bolshevik Russia except all the principal actors are replaced by farm animals, and it's one of the most beloved political works of all time - and for good reason. Any of Ayn Rand's works, even though they're all loving terrible, have been effective and influential, despite the fact that if you read literally any of her books they're overwritten bullshit paeans to Objectivism and how awful socialist institutions are. And, more recently, indie game Night in the Woods is an overt commentary on the failures of coastal neoliberalism and how that poisoned, awful, ultimately selfish ideology destroys small midwest and Rust Belt towns, and how those same towns are essentially doomed to a cycle of financial insecurity. So, "Oxygen" being so blatantly and so obviously an anti-capitalism polemic is not a point against it. In fact, its strong political leanings are a point in its favor, because unlike Harness' works on DW it doesn't pretend to be something it's not. If you think capitalism is super great and awesome and moral or whatever, well, firstly, you're wrong, but secondly "Oxygen" doesn't even loving pretend to appeal to you. "Zygon Inversion" is some xenophobic, racist bullshit wrapped with an exterior of Capaldi being awesome and smugly owning people, which makes it all the more offensive because it's literally conning you into internalizing its own awful ideologies. "Oxygen" is all about how awful capitalism is. You're either on board or you're not, but at least you're not being deceived. Being so blatant in its statements also allows for people not to misinterpret its underlying points, whether intentionally or not. Neoliberals, who are among the worst people on this planet, are especially good at aggressively missing the point. They love to bring up works like The Hunger Games and Harry Potter in the context of combatting Donald Trump, white supremacists, and Nazis, but they also love to hector about "respectability politics", or both sides-ism, and they absolutely adore bring up some pithy, pointless quote about violence only begetting violence. It's because they like the stark, infantile black-and-white morality THG and HP paint their worlds, and they love feeling good instead of doing good. Trump is Voldemort, and we're "fighting" Trump with our worthless loving hashtags and thinkpieces and our super awesome replies to any of his terrible tweets, but when antifa or DSA goes and punches a loving Nazi in his fascist loving face we talk about "optics" or fall on some boilerpate centrist "freedom of speech" poo poo. And it's because they view what's currently happening in the context of the fiction they consume, without thinking at all about the deeper layers of that fiction because it's all under the surface. The Hunger Games is literally all about how austerity is violence, how a moneyed elite - a one percent, if you will - control and subjugate the proletariat by setting them against each other. And it's, ultimately, about how the only way for the proletariat to reclaim their humanity is via violent revolution against their oppressors. But neolibs just see mockingjays or Katniss Everdeen or The Resistance and think that that's all they have to do, while both criticizing actual protest as either pointless or ineffective and arguing against systemic overhauls that would combat inequality as either impossible or prone to abuse. What they ignore is that there's no material difference between the government denying someone lifesaving healthcare and the government choosing someone to fight in a Battle Royale-esque bloodsport for their life. The government kills both people in both cases, it's just in one instance it's way more blatant and cruel about it. Harry Potter has some real troubling political opinions both as a work and, especially, espoused by its author, but it's ultimately about how the only way to combat fascism is via necessary violence. But you don't hear that, you hear dumbasses call Clinton "McGonagall" and talk about how they take roles in "Dumbledore's Army" while whining about broken windows, without once thinking about what it loving means to be a part of an army. They think all speech should be protected while ignoring that hate speech is its own form of violence, they call white supremacists loving Death Eathers and poo poo but start lovely GoFundMes for GOP buildings while ignoring how HP makes a specific point of how the Ministry of Magic empowers and enables Voldemort and his crew to seize power. And this is all because the lessons that HP and THG teaches, all the points they make are below the surface and whether from malicious ignorance or being just too loving stupid to see them you get worthless, worthless neoliberals who just view that media on that surface level. We are Good. They are Bad. End of story. By never once hiding its deeper message - I mean, hell, The Doctor literally brags about destroying Capitalism at the end of it - "Oxygen" avoids the pitfall of being twisted or its impact lessened to bolster worthless, status-quo centrism. "Oxygen" is also wondrous because the political overtones both make coherent sense and are barely an exaggeration of real life. Selling people oxygen is not any different from the CEO of Nestle arguing for the privatization of water. If we look back on the history of industrialization, there has even been stuff like the employer selling back essential goods and services to their workers. I mean, there's no coincidence that "Oxygen" is set on a mining ship - mines literally had "company stores" where they sold food and other goods, at markup, to their workers, while paying them in a mine-specific currency only useful in that store. Financial exploitation of workers was as literal as it is here, instead of hid behind the concept of "wage theft" or "unpaid overtime" or "union busting". The underlying conflict of "Oxygen" - mechanized suits that have been ordered to kill all living creatures so those living creatures' employers can fully automate the station with those suits - are not an exaggeration of real life. McDonald's, the single largest US employer, is attempting to fully automate their restarants right now. Once they do, and they will, hundreds of thousands of people will have literally no job opportunities as they lose their only source of income. They will lose their housing, they will lose their health care. They will be unable to afford rent, or groceries, or gas for their cars. People will, literally, die, and, again - there is no material difference between a company killing its workers and consigning those same workers to death via loss of financial security. One's just much slower. And it's why Universal Basic Income is so necessary - we are hitting a point where automation will replace all low-level, menial labor in this country, and corporations could not be more overjoyed it's about to happen due to robots almost never loving up, not needing to be paid, and being able to work forever. But, once that happens, millions and millions of people will not be able to work. More importantly, they won't need to work - jobs will shift further and further into either creative or highly specialized fields as automation replaces all hard and even most skilled labor. And when that happens, the only solution is a universal income guaranteed to everyone, because there literally will not be enough jobs to go around. That's the utopian vision. The vision espoused by the right and neoliberals is the future that gives us "Oxygen", wherein we even more firmly establish a caste system that the one that already exists in America and other first-world countries and treat what little labor there is left as indentured servitude bordering on slavery, wherein corporations put a dollar amount on people's lives and create a byzantine system of rules that seek to maximize profits for literally no reason then to make numbers go up. And this is largely an expansion of people contending that capitalism is anything but an economic system. It's an amoral, evil necessity of when it was created, like feudalism before it, that incentivized people to do things that were a net good overall via the explotiation of labor. The railroads are a great example of this - they were necessary, and the amount of good things that happened in America after they were created (cheap public transportation and transportation of goods, allowed for the country's rapid expansion, strengthened farming, just to name a few) cannot be discounted - but they were only possible due to the robber barons, who were incentivized by base greed, created via capitalism. The railroads needed to be made but at the time the only way they were made was via exploitation of the poor and people of color via some truly hateful, evil poo poo that robber barons pulled. We live in a world where labor is essentially valueless because it's nearly infinite - automation is almost there. The entire structure of capitalism is based off the fundamental premise that human labor has value and must be exploited to maximize value for the people at the top. Once robots can do our jobs, capitalism has no point in existing. It is outdated. The reaction humanity has to capitalism becoming obsolete will determine whether we live in a Star Trek utopia or whether we end up like the crew in "Oxygen". "Oxygen" is so great because it never, not once, ever pretends that the villain is anything but the concept of capitalism. It's not the zombies, it's not the suits who make them, it's not even the corporation that ordered those suits to kill the humans. It's capitalism. The corporation is nameless for a reason. Its name doesn't matter, because it's not specifically amoral. Capitalism is amoral, it contends that people only have value if they provide value, and that valueless members of society are definitionally extraneous. Nothing the nameless evil corporation is bad, capitalistically speaking, because capitalism is a system that has no moral center. Its only purpose is to create more money. If it existed in the real world, that company would be lauded for its measures. Correction - that company has been lauded. Uber pays its workers severely below minimum wage, forces them to pay out of pocket for maintenance and upkeep of their own vehicles, and literally loving reinvented the bus. They cut prices severely, operating at a loss, solely because all they want to do is force out a moderately skilled, well-paying unionized labor position that already exists (taxi drivers) and muscle out a socialized alternative that works well (public bussing) so they can, eventually, replace their already underpaid and uncompensated non-union workers with automation. That's literally their endgoal, they are attempting to kill taxis and replace them with self-driving cars, burning money like crazy in the meantime, just to reap the profits whenever it inevitably happens. And they're being lauded in Silicon Valley and by neoliberals across the country for their foresight. They are destroying an industry and people are cheering, because capitalism is such a fundamentally rotten worldview. Capitalism had its time and place, but that time and that place are nearly over. We are seeing it in the reactions of baby boomers, the single largest source of neoliberalism, with their awful endless thinkpieces about why or how Millennials are killing X by not buying Y. They ignore that they openly embraced a version of completely unrestricted capitalism that made our generation extremely poor overall, on top of limiting our financial security and futures. Essentially, they both made us unable and unwilling to buy frivolous bullshit, to be able to or want to participate in the conspicuous consumption that defines them, and have the gall to hector us for it. Socialism, once a career-killing slur in American politics, is now the stated political leaning of its most popular politician. In Britain, the most beloved politician is deeply socialist who believes strongly in the power of public safety nets. Things are changing, and the people who have defined their entire livelihoods around the idea that a person with more zeroes in their personal net worth is a better person than one who doesn't have no idea what to do. So now we're seeing the pushback, the embracing of such worthless assholes as Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley in general as the saviors of the Democratic Party, because these cunts cannot accept the idea that capitalism is dying. So now we're at a crossroads, and it's that specific crossroads where "Oxygen" is so necessary and so good. You can either be The Doctor or Jamie Mathieson and recognize capitalism as the outdated, evil, amoral piece of poo poo that it is, and vow to do everything in your power to destroy it, or you can not. You can cheerlead the exact viewpoints that has caused so much death and pain in the past, that's causing so much death and pain now, and will continue to cause so much death and pain in the future - perhaps even as overtly as "Oxygen" contends. Those are your two options - help the public or help enrich the private. Grade: A Random Thoughts:
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Aug 16, 2017 19:43
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Quick update: my laptop refuses to display anything but the bios when it turns on, and nothing else. I think my computer is hosed. This will significantly screw up my updating for at least the next episode, assuming my computer eventually fixes itself. If it doesn't ill have to figure out another solution (I'm writing this post on my tablet).
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Aug 21, 2017 01:21
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