Before we get to the Important Bits (Daleks! Spitfires! Tea!), some brief notes from the real world.

First and foremost, Raven's gone.

Boarded a plane on Monday morning and flew across the Pacific Ocean. Gone home.

...

Yes, I'm cheating. Trying for a false sense of emotional tension only (now) to admit that, while the above is technically true, the reader's most likely inference is incorrect.

Yes, she's gone home, but not to stay.

Still, she's been away six days and won't return for another five weeks. A hell of a way to see in the early days of a Relationship, but being 45 instead of 25 certainly makes it easier. Time moves a lot faster now than it did then, and experience tells me those five weeks will not only be over sooner than I image but optimism insists distance will make the heart grow (even) fonder.

But I'd be a liar if I said I don't miss her. I hope you have a marvellous time, sweetie!

Meanwhile, I am unwashed and unshaven, to the point where I begin to disgust even myself. Tomorrow, I shall lave myself and my clothes, work out and start studying Mandarin before it's too late.

But for now, another Doctor Who entry. I'll spare your friends page and put the whole damned thing ( below the cut (yes, there'll be spoilers, definitely for 'Victory of the Daleks' and maybe for the execrable 'The Beast Below'. )

"Do everything I tell ya, don't ask stupid questions ... and don't wander off."

You see, I cross-posted my reaction to the latest Doctor Who episode to a Livejournal community, where a goodly-percentage of the folks responding too my opening line, "The girlfriend fell asleep" as all manner of sexist and/or at-least-gender-clueless commentary suggesting that Doctor Who is a boys' thing, as if I didn't know or didn't care, that women like it too.

As a Doctor Who fan community, which had by and large reacted to The Eleventh Hour pretty positively, I had expected people to take issue with my critique of the writing. That I would, instead, have been taken to task for besmirching the geekiness of female fans or worse, of denying their very existence, never once occurred to me.

So far as the writer was concerned, I was talking about my particular girlfriend's individual reaction to a television show about which I am a little abnormally enamoured. That anyone would take what I thought was just a cute hook (though one based in reality — she really did fall asleep) as a general commentary on women and science fiction, or anything remotely like that, never even occurred to me.

But that's mostly what happened.

And I'm reminded of a piece of writerly advice I've come across quite a few times, I think first from Judith Merril: Your favourite line — the one you really love? Take it out! It's almost certainly self-indulgent twaddle!

I don't think I actually apologized to anyone for my words, but I sure as hell spent more time than I wanted to explaining what I meant instead of arguing about what I thought of the episode.

Obviously, only the blandest and most pedestrian of writers will never be misinterpreted, but when a whole raft of people miss your point, you're probably doing something wrong.

Cross-posted from Edifice Rex Online

Considering Doctor Who: The Eleventh Hour

Steven Moffat's debut shows promise
but fails the girlfriend test

The girlfriend fell asleep.

Steven Moffat's maiden voyage as the 'show-runner' behind the venerable franchise was a long way from a disaster, but by no means was it a triumphant success, either.

Amy Pond (Karen Gillian) and the eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith), exploring the new, steam-punkish TARDIS.

Granted that, following on the heels of Russell T Davies', bloated and self-indulgent finale, my expectations were running pretty high. After all, Moffat was responsible for both "The Doctor Dances" and "Blink" (the latter of which even the girlfriend enjoyed; and she is not much interested in SF or even science fantasy when you get right down to it) and so it was that I'd more and more often taken to shouting "Doctor Who!" or mumbling bars of the theme song at random moments with an ever increasing frequency as "Easter Saturday" approached.

Now, with Easter past, the Moffat era is officially upon us.

And the girlfriend fell asleep. In that unintended critique lies a most accurate appraisal of Moffat's opening salvo.

At nearly 70 minutes long, "The Eleventh Hour" was either 20 minutes too long or 30 minutes too short. ( Very mild plot spoilers, but one major visual spoiler, below. )

More years ago than I care to count, the science fiction writer and editor Judith Merril taught me one of the only vital rules of writing.

"When you're editing your work, think about every word in every sentence of every paragraph. If anything doesn't have to be there, take it out!"

Never a dogmatist, Judy didn't mean that that rule (or any rule) had to be slavishly followed. She did mean that, if you broke a rule, you should know damned well why you were breaking it.

Which, yes, brings me — typically late to a Hollywood party — to J.J. Abrams' "re-boot" of the venerable Star Trek franchise.

Star Trek has received pretty good reviews. The Globe and Mail gave it three-stars, saying, "Star Trek gets its mojo back in J. J. Abrams's swinging reboot of the franchise. Smart and youthful, with a well-balanced package of humour, crisp action and character-based drama ...", and it's getting about 95% positive ranking on RottenTomatoes.com (whatever exactly that means).

All of which strikes me as at once bizarre and all-too typical of the (lack of) film criticism, at least when it comes to the latest "blockbuster" offering.

Now, the movies has its moments and I can assure nervous Trekkies (if there are any who haven't yet seen it) that Star Trek's casting and characterizations of the iconic characters are both pretty good. The new-comers successfully walk the fine line between imitation and interpretation of such stalwarts as Kirk, Spock and McCoy. On the other hand, there would be no movie were it not for its idiot plot — if you can tell me why Leonard Nimoy's "Spock prime" (as I think I've seen the character referred to) didn't just walk the 14 kilometres to the Star Fleet outpost on his own, I'll give you a gold star.

But never mind the plot details or the casting specifics; I want to talk about the film's first 30 minutes, a bloated and ponderous admixture of emotionally pointless action scenes and a pseudo-psychological, "realistic" background for the (re-booted) James Tiberius Kirk.

Star Trek clocks in at just under two hours, though the actual story doesn't really get underway until we're past that first 30 minutes, during which half-hour minutes, we learn the following:

• Kirk's father was (for 12 minutes) a starship Captain who died heroically, saving his wife and his in-the-process-of-being-born son (I don't know about you, but I am sick to death of The Birth Scene);
• as a child, Kirk was already a hell-raiser and had a poor relationship with his step-father;
• as a young man, Kirk was still a hell-raiser as well as being a drinker who enjoyed (but wasn't particularly good at) bar-room brawling;
• Kirk is nevertheless very intelligent, stubborn and an original thinker; and
• er, that's about it (to be fair, four or five minutes of that 30 minutes is also devoted to Spock's childhood and early adult years).

That's an awful lot of time to spend learning so little and, frankly, were I not an old (if lapsed) fan, I'd have have walked at around the 15-minute mark.

Compare the above with what Russell T Davies managed in only two minutes, with his "re-boot" of the even more venerable Doctor Who franchise. (Here's a Youtube link, well-worth taking two minutes to look at. I'll wait until you're done.)

As (I hope) you'll have seen, in that 110 seconds, we learn the following about Rose, who would be the viewer-identification character over the subsequent two seasons of Doctor Who, and who was an entirely new character to boot.

• The opening (not-quite) 20 seconds, panning from empty space, to the moon, to the Earth, to England, to Rose's alarm-clock, give us the sense this isn't going to be a domestic drama but rather one with a very broad scope;
• Rose is young enough that she still lives with her mother;
• Rose's mother doesn't seem to have a job;
• Rose does have a job, as a clerk in a department store, and uses public transportation; in other words, she is working class; and,
• Rose has a boyfriend, who appears to be a bit of a clown and who is, apparently incidentally, black, while Rose is white.

And at the one-minute, fifty-second mark, the story begins, while at the same point in Star Trek we've just witnessed a generic battle scene, the significance of which we know absolutely nothing about. If this kind of long-winded story-telling is typical of what Hollywood is producing nowadays, I'm going to keep staying away from the movie theatre, no matter how many stars are awarded by the critics.

With some judicious editing, and some repairs to the idiot plot and Star Trek would have made a decent one-hour television episode. At twice that length, I am simply baffled by its apparent popularity.

(Cross-posted from Edifice Rex Online.)

God said to Abraham kill me a son
Abe said man, you must be putting me on
God said no — Abe said what?
God said you can do what you want Abe, but,
Next time you see me coming you better run.
Abe said where'd you want this killing done?
God said out on highway 61

— Bob Dylan

It was probably the simply embarassing post-script to the third Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi, that first really made me realize the often inverse relationship between hype and reality. (And of course, this year's utter travesty of an end to the sometimes brilliant Battlestar Galactica to remind me that getting my hopes up is always risky business.)

While most of North America's children and geeks are making hits out of Star Trek and even more (god help us) out of Transformers: Something-or-other, Great Britain's BBC has provided us with something a little different. A five-hour "special event", a mini-series broadcast (in the UK) on Monday through Friday of the week of the 6th called Torchwood: Children of Earth (it's airing this coming week starting tomorrow on BBC America, but I haven't been able to pin down when it will show up in Canada). For once, the work actually lived up to the hype.

Truth to tell, until now Torchwood has been more of a guilty pleasure for me than anything else. A Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood was, and was meant to be, a grittier, more "adult" version of the alien monster-battling children's show. The violence was more graphic, there was sex (male/female, female/female and male/male as well as "miscellaneous" — these people dealt with aliens, after all) along with near-nudity and swearing, including the F-word, at least during the first season.

By the end of the second season, four of the seven original members of the "team" had died violent deaths, leaving fans to wonder whether this year's edition would introduce new characters. As it turns out, long-time fans will have more grieving to do — but I'll say no more along those lines.

For more, along with some (though — I hope — not too many) spoilers, please click the cut below. Otherwise, book-mark and return once you've watched it — and ( then we can argue! )

Edit, close to 24 hours after the fact: If you're coming to this post late and feel inclined to hammer me for it, please read the comments first. I was wrong all over the place and don't want you to have to point out things to me that others have done already.

Jesus. I wanted this post to be All About Me and the fact that my ewebsite has been rebuilt and is now interactive (yes, comments about the look and feel of it are more than welcome; at this point, most of you are familiar with most of the material that's on it), but instead I've spent hours reading various iterations of the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of (January) 2009.

Some of you are already aware of it and I don't have the strength to try to summarize it — suffice it to say that that the starting point was matociquala's post about "writing the other". The ensuing discussion/flame-war(s) contain(s) links-a-plenty for those interested in pursuings it/them.

In a nutshell (as I understand/remember it — and note that my understanding has changed quite a bit over the past few days), matociquala's post was side-hijacked by a reply which suggested she was naive and (unconsciously) racist in some of her assumptions and before you knew it, the flame was on. Attacks were parried, counter-attacks launched and feelings were bruised left, right and centre. (And some very interesting light was shed, as well — three or four hours ago I ws prepared to sit down and write a screed about "professional victims" who find "racism" in every nook and cranny, but now I'm not so sure that wouldn't be to attack a couple of lunatics while ignoring a whole lot of interesting thinking. So I'll hold my fire in the larger battle until such time as I'm sure it's warranted.)

At least, sort of.

During my reading, I ran into a post by Livejournaler Prusik, who, on said on Tnh's livejournal to Doctor Who's rejuvenator, Russell T. Davis' 11th episode of last season's Turn Left.

For those of you who are not fans (shocking!), the framing device for the episode was set on a planet (or at least a city) largely inhabited by people one can only presumed were of Chinese descent. The setting reminded me of what I imagine Hong Kong looked like in the 1970s and the actors spoke English like people only recently off the boat.

prusik said,

I totally understand that, in terms of impact, intentionality does not matter. "Turn Left" affected me viscerally in ways that I'm sure RTD did not intend. Whether RTD intended it as an example of the whole "Dr Fu Man Chu" evil Chinese villain thing or not is utterly irrelevant to the textual analysis that shows we have people who are villains, who are evil, and, oh yeah, they happen to be foreign, exotic Chinese people. How ever RTD tries to justify it, I will still see it as an example of using the Chinese ethnicity as a short hand for "inscrutable, evil villain." Note that here, race is intrinsically a part of the text. (This is not the case with Patrick's statement. Racial context there was inferred.)

He also said,

i.e., I agree. "He didn't mean to" is not a meaningful rebuttal to "'Turn Left'makes use of the 'inscrutable Chinese villain'" trope." (This, BTW, does not mean that someone can not successfully explain to me why "Turn Left" is not, in fact, racist. It just means "He didn't mean to" will not do so successfully.)

There's one factual error above, and I suspect it's indicative of the over-sensitivity (I think) some people have when it comes to the portrayal of minorities/ethnics/people-of-colour.

On the other hand, presumably, Davies should get credit for setting a Doctor Who episode on a planet largely bereft of white people; but on the other, Doctor Who adventures pretty much demand that someone is a bad guy — and if the Doctor is on a planet colonized by Chinese people, the villain pretty much has to be Chinese, doesn't he she?

The "factual error" I referred to was in prusik use of the term, "'inscrutable Chinese villain'" trope." To my eyes, the villain was not at all "inscrutable", but was, rather, duplicitous and — her plot foiled — emotional.

Yes, the episode's framing device was set on a world (or city) that appeared to be a lot like a western image of (industrial) China; yes, the villain was ethnically Chinese.

But so what?

Does the fact that Russell T. Davies is a white Englishman preclude him from telling stories set in other (human) cultures?*

Does being "sensitive" mean that Davies cannot (legitimately) cast "people of colour" as villains?

Quite seriously, am I missing something important here?

If I haven't made it abundantly clear, I don't think I am. But I'd be very interested in hearing why you think I'm wrong, if you do.

*For the record, I realize that no one criticizing him on LJ is in a position to stop Davies from setting stories, and casting them, anywhere he wants. My question is about the intention of the criticism, not its (non-existent) censorial powers or intent.