ed_rex

Nightmare In Tedium

Neil Gaiman channels Stephen Thompson

(Which is never a good thing)

On more than one occasion, the writer Harlan Ellsion insisted his name be removed from a movie or television program and replaced with that of Cordwainer Bird in place of his own. He did it when he believed his script had been butchered: changed to the point where the on-screen result would in some way make him look bad. It was his way of "flipping the bird" at those who had ruined his work and, more, of protecting his own reputation as a screen-writer.

If Neil Gaiman doesn't have a pseudonym for similar circumstances, he should get one — and apply it retroactively to his sophomore entry as a screen-writer for Doctor Who.

"Nightmare in Silver" isn't the worst episode of this year's often-dreadful half-series (far from it) but it isn't very good, either.

It is almost inconceivable that the the writer of "The Doctor's Wife" (not to mention of the Sandman graphic novels) could have handed in a script as dramatically disjointed, as illogical and as frankly boring, as that which showed up on our television screens this past weekend. And surely, it wasn't Neil Gaiman who closed the episode with the appalling spectacle of the Doctor almost literally drooling as he ponders the sight of Clara in a skirt just "a little bit too tight".

A nightmare in silver? More like pewter, or even tin. Spoilers and snark, as usual.

The contempt of the show-runner

An insult. A slap in the face. Or should I say, another insult, another slap in the face?

What more is there to say? The whole of Steven Moffat's Doctor Who has been a long series of insults dressed up as Big Ideas, punctuated by apologies from the likes of Richard Curtis and Neil Gaiman.

But how long can we point to "Vincent and the Doctor" or "The Doctor's Wife" and tell ourselves that Steven Moffat actually cares about the cultural institution in his charge?

The truth is, we have become so used to terrible television that when the merely mediocre happens along, people like me nearly start preaching the second coming.

It's time we face the truth: Steven Moffat holds us, his audience, in utter contempt. Take as Exhibit 37, the latest mess of a program broadcast under the name of Doctor Who.

"Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" begins with an implausible and arbitrary set-up and is propelled by a plot that works only through the unlikely stupidity of its guest characters, the even more unlikely (and dumb) decisions of its regulars and a resolution that re-uses — yet again! — one of Moffat's now tired and tiresome time-travel tropes — and which then cheats on its own rules. The BBC brain-trust ought to be ashamed to have allowed it to air.

My full review is behind this link, but be warned: I am not happy and sometimes I say so in language unfit for ears of the young and tender, or for eyes of work-mates reading over one's shoulder. Also, there are spoilers, as per normal.

Finally, if you want to suggest that I hate this show so much I shouldn't be reviewing it, you may be right. But I committed myself to seeing Series 7 through to the end, and so I will. But after that? If Steven Moffat is still in charge, I rather suspect I'll be done with the show for the duration. Those of you as sick of my opinions as I am sick of Steven Moffat's stories probably have more reason for hope than I do.

"The Cold War" weds mediocrity with subtle brilliance

Jenna-Louise Coleman becoming a revelation

April 19, 2013, OTTAWA — Late again, I know. Life and an episode of back-aches has kept me busy.

And more, I found it hard to find my focus on this episode. An entertaining tale on the surface, dig just a little bit and you find in the Mark Gatiss-penned "The Cold War" only another stop on Steven Moffat's Travelling Medicine Show of Intellectual Horrors.

An idiot plot, in other words.

But there was an upside, beyond the mere fact this episode made for the second in a row that managed at least to be an entertaining distraction on first viewing. That is, that Jenna-Louise Coleman is starting to look like the best regular actor to grace this series since maybe as far back as Christopher Eccleson's turn as the Ninth Doctor, and certainly since Catherine Tate played Donna Noble.

I know, I know, it's early days, and so I stand to be corrected, but so far Coleman is doing remarkable things with often ludicrous material. "Click here to read more, and to watch a video aide. Spoilers, as always. Links to my Series 7 reviews can be found at Edifice Rex Online.

(I know, I know, I know; Doctor Who again. I thought I was done with it too ...

But I ain't; in fact, my intention (because working on a full-length book and driving 26 days in March doesn't take up enough of my time) is to blog every god damned episode of Steven Moffat's fershlugginner version of Who.

In order to spare those of you who don't give a damn, I'll keep this entry brief.

• The teaser is up on here, currently at the top of Rex's front page;


• The new Series 7 section introduction is here; and


• the review proper is right here.

One of these days, there will be something personal in this space as well. But not today. (And possibly, a poll: I really wonder how many people on my friends' lists — LJ and DW, but especially Livejournal — still actually pop in to read their lists. Lord knows, few enough of you are posting anymore.)

But for now, I'm off to cross-post, while the Habs game is playing in a small window at upper left. Ciao!.

1.0: Finding the culture-verse in an FM radio receiver

1.1: The kids today

Driving home yesterday, I did something I almost never do: being bored with CBC Radio and the Montreal AM sports station blathering on about something not hockey, I chanced upon a commercial music station and decided to give it a listen.

94.7 FM it was, "Montreal's Hit Music Channel".

What struck me first was that this station really plays pop hits, not just hits of a particular genre. 94.7 FM ain't a rock station, nor a pop station nor even a hip-hop station. It is all of the above, if I dare to judge by that hour and some minutes of exposure. The only thing missing was country (which has really been subsumed into rock anyway; Hank Williams wouldn't recognize today's "country" if it crooned at his 24 hours straight. But I digress).

The kids today, it seems, don't limit themselves to one particular style of noise music, but are in fact one hell of a lot more catholic in their tastes that the radio of my era would have suggested.

And good on them; I guess the internet is good for something after all, eh?

1.2: Disco laughs last

That said, and though the technical merits of the music on offer were bloody slick, there was a sameness at the back of just about everything I heard, a monotonous back-beat that reminded me of the "sound" in the 80s when even really good drummers did their damnest to immitate drum machines.

Driving just about all the music I heard last night was a descendant of disco's throbbing dance-hall backbeat. I'm not saying there is nothing to distinguish between the pop songs and the rap tunes and the rock-and-roll on offer, but all three had clearly been infected by that which so many of us loudly said "sucked" way back in the day.

I guess people like to dance ...

1.3: The decline of Anglo Montréal (and the rise of a bilingual urban polity)

As you might have noticed above, 94.7 is an English-language radio station. Not so the ads. Like many of my Montréal-based passengers, the ads on 94.7 presume the audience is bilingual. At a guess, I'd say maybe a third of those I heard were in French, and French only.

Which is pretty god damned cool, when you think about it.

And which, as I alluded to above, matches my observation of the younger cohort among my Montréal-based crews. Those people, Anglo and Franco alike, are bilingual down to their genes, switching between languages while they talk without any hesitation, nor even, any apparent self-consciousness. Whatever works in the moment.

Dunno if the phenomenon will survive over the long term, but in the short one, it is a beautiful thing to witness.

2.0: Speaking ill of the dead

To completely change the subject, those of you who give a damn already know that Elisabeth Sladen — yes, Doctor Who's Sarah Jane Smith — dies nearly two years ago now.

What you might not know is that she wrote (or rather, she told her story to a hack) a memoir shortly before the cancer got her.

Fool that I am, I dared to hope that Lis Sladen might be even half as interesting as Sarah Jane was. Not quite. Elisabeth Sladen: the autobiography is really only going to be of interest to those who knew her work with the Third and Fourth Doctors, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. That's what most of the book covers, but only superficially.

Anyway, my full review lives here and my intro to that piece is over here.

3.0 Music, music, (new) music!

Finally, for those of you who've slogged all the way through my meanderings, a reward. Gin Wigmore is a young(ish) Kiwi who has knocked my proverbial socks off like no one since Emmy the Great came to my cognizance maybe a half-year or so back.

Anyway, without further ado ... Sweet Hell with Gin Wigmore!

No escaping the Tedium of the Daleks

It's not too far off a year since Doctor Who last graced our screens, the 2011 Christmas special. Which I know I watched, but about which I did not blog and of which now I remember precisely nothing at all — save that I found it dull but not outrageously offensive.

(Oh. Wait. As I typed the preceding, I began to recall that episode's companion of the hour. A woman, naturally, and one whose identify (correct me if I'm wrong) and whose heroism was entirely bound up in the fact of her motherhood. Hot mother or hot model, that's our Mr. Moffat. Ah well, onwards.)

Between that ostensible special then and the program's resumption now, I made the mistake of paying good money to see Moffat (et al)'s Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (which was only the second worst movie I have seen this year). So it comes as no surprise that "Asylum of the Daleks" shows no sign that Moffat has taken a remedial course in story-telling. Indeed, the new outing only provides further proof that Steven Moffat has forgotten everything there is to know about the basics of narrative fiction.

What Moffat does have is a strong command of the idea of story-telling, the parts that make up a story. But of story itself? Fuggedaboutit.

Does it sound as if I repeat myself? No doubt: I repeat myself. If that bothers you, please just pass on by. Otherwise, please click the link to (re)discover the moral vacuum at the heart of Steven Moffat's Doctor Who. Spoilers within, of course.

The improbable plagiarist

Every so often a famous writer gets taken down for plagiarism. Usually it's something pretty blatant, words and concepts lifted almost verbatim from a well-known work, as if it had improbably never occurred to the culprit that he or she might get caught.

When they do get caught, they typically claim it was an accident, that they must have done it sub-consciously. And the rest of us wonder, How stupid do you think we are? Give us a break and just 'fess up!

But I am suddenly much more sympathetic to those claims than I once was.

In my ostensible leisure time this week, I've been working pretty hard on my response to The Wedding of River Song and, yesterday, had what I thought was a well-argued two thousand words merely in need of a little polishing.

Towards the end of it, I made reference to a review I wrote earlier this year. Decided to link to it. And, linking, re-read it.

Guess what? I had been plagiarizing myself.

It wasn't word-for-word, but it was close. It was was a dismaying, a frustrating and a scary discovery. I really do try to credit sources, to quote directly or to paraphrase with attribution — and here I was, ripping off my own work!

Honest go god, your Honour! It was all sub-conscious!.

And so it is that my review of The Wedding of River Song, now plagiarism-free (I hope!), is a lot shorter than I had expected it to be, with a very conscious link to that which I have written before. As usual, spoilers and snark below the icing ... of The Wedding Cake of River Song.

The god, complex?

Taken by itself, The God Complex is a mostly entertaining episode, competently-scripted and boasting quite stylish direction.

At least one guest star really shines, none of them bore us, and we're treated to the requisite chills expected of an encounter with the unknown in company of Doctor Who.

But The God Complex comes after three stand-alone adventure in what this viewer, at least, had thought had been advertised as a complex, series-long arc of single story, one that would presumably lead to a climax providing two series' worth of answers to dangling threads.

Does The God Complex deliver as prophesied? Click here to find out — spoilers and opinions as usual, so proceed at your own risk.

Rory's choice, Amy's choices

I know, I know, it's an awful cliche, but true nonetheless: I laughed and I cried.

There's more to say, but the short version (tl;dr) is that The Girl Who Waited is the stand-alone episode of Doctor Who that last week's Night Terrors threatened to be, and that The Doctor's Wife very nearly delivered: exciting, original and emotionally intense, with some hard-to-answer questions about the implications of time-travel thrown if for those who might want to ponder them, yet never once hitting the viewer who isn't interested in such thins over the head with them.

In other words, the The Girl Who Waited is the best episode of Doctor Who to appear since Steven Moffat took over as show-runner.

It is a story rigorous in its internal logic, emotionally gripping and intellectually satisfying, one that never cheats and one which offers no easy outs.

Add to that a remarkable performance from Karen Gillan and strong ones from both Arthur Darvill and Matt Smith, and we have been given an episode that, despite a heavy does of pathos, contains at its heart, like a glowing ember of the Tardis itself, a strange sort of joy that serves to remind this too-often disappointed fan just why it is he has stayed with the program.

Instant classic? Only time (or Time) will tell. But for my immediate thoughts, along with the standard spoilers, on the best episode of Doctor Who in a very long time, click here.

Vote for Geoffrey and Raven!

Nahanni National Park, Virginia Falls. Image from Wikipedia.

All right, silly as it sounds, I'm asking for your help. At least the help of all of you who (a) live in Canada and (b) have a Facebook account.

ETA: Actually, it seems all you need is a Facebook account, so all of you, please just in and send us on our way!

My sweetie has never been camping, and neither of us have ever been to the Far North (or white-water rafting, for that matter). With your help, we just might win a trip to the Nahanni National Park.

Click here to vote for my perfect 50-word wish, okay? Many thanks in advance.

Onwards.

(Almost) almost famous

( People are talkin' 'bout me! )