Archive for September, 2011

Doctor Who: Closing Time

2011.09.28 at 23:20 · Filed under Media ·Tagged , , , , ,

The Lodger was brilliant, easily Gareth Roberts’ best contribution to the series up to that point and one of my favorite episodes. So, when I heard about a “sequel” story involving Craig and written by Roberts, I was excited. When I learned it had Cybermen in it, well… Cybermen don’t have the best track record, but I trusted Roberts to deliver a pretty good Cybermen story.

And he did. In fact, ‘pretty good’ is a very appropriate adjectival phrase for the episode. It wasn’t brilliant. It doesn’t risk dislodging The Lodger as Roberts’ best episode. But it was a fun, light-hearted romp involving Cybermen with some very interesting moments. I was particularly amused by the Doctor’s conversations with Stormageddon, and the return of the Cybermat.

But there’s not a whole lot more to say about the episode itself. Well, maybe a few things. What made The Lodger work so well was the way it thrust the Doctor into an ordinary life and watched his reaction to it; we see the Doctor trying to be (and thoroughly enjoying the idea of being) a regular bloke. He plays football, he has his own room in a flat, he interjects himself into the drama of Craig and Sophie. At times it feels like the Doctor has been dropped into the wrong show, and at other times it feels like he has fallen out of the Mediasphere altogether and landed in a day in someone’s life. And the Doctor in these situations creates a wonderful, postmodern story about a mythic figure interacting with the ordinary world, and which highlights the advantages and wonder that can be found in mundane life.

And Closing Time tries to replicate that feeling, with the Doctor emphasizing that he’s just there for a visit, and later with his getting a job at a department store. But it doesn’t pan out; I’m not certain if it is because his motives are too clearly otherwise, or simply because the tone of the story isn’t quite right, but the Doctor doesn’t feel convincingly a part of everyday life this time.

Aside from that, the pacing in this episode is interesting. At first it felt like the pacing was off – like the story was progressing too slowly. But by the end of the episode, I realized that the slow pacing was, if not intentional, then well-chosen; along with more classic-feeling Cybermen (see the Cybermat) we get a classic series sense of pacing condensed into 45 minutes. The result is quite enjoyable, and a nice bit of a breather after the intense episodes we’ve had so far since the series picked back up. It feels like the calm before the storm.

Speaking of the storm… it’s time for

The Wedding of River Song Speculation

I have to apologize to Night Terrors. I didn’t realize the creepy rhyme the dolls sing was actually tied into the overall arc, rather than shoehorned in as a last-minute arc connection. I definitely have to give the episode a bit more credit in retrospect for weaving that bit in.

So, let’s have a look at that rhyme. Kovarian has given us the end of the first stanza, so the dolls’ version goes something like this:

Tick tock goes the clock
And what now shall we play?
Tick tock goes the clock
Now summer’s gone away

Tick tock goes the clock
And what then shall we see?
Tick tock until the day
That thou shalt marry me

Tick tock goes the clock
And all the years they fly
Tick tock and all too soon
You and I must die

Tick tock goes the clock
We laughed at fate and mourned her
Tick tock goes the clock
Even for the Doctor

Tick tock goes the clock
He cradled her and he rocked her
Tick tock goes the clock
Even for the Doctor

The first stanza is a little vague, although it’s easy enough to see a metaphor between summer and youth – neither the Doctor nor River are particularly young any more. After that, though, the parallels to the Doctor and River are pretty straightforward. I wouldn’t normally do this line by line, but I’m in the mood to be thorough. So…

‘Thou shalt marry me’ is an obvious reference to the finale, given its title.
‘You and I must die’ – well, we know that River dies in the library, while the Doctor (presumably) dies at Lake Silencio in, well, the series opener and probably again in the finale.
‘We laughed at fate and mourned her’ again calls to mind Silence in the Library, where the Doctor laughs at fate by saving River’s life (sort of) while still mourning her. Although, it could be a foreshadowing instead (see my budding theory/observation further down)
‘He cradled and he rocked her’… well, we know about the cradle. And while I may have an especially dirty mind, I think that ‘he rocked her’ might be exactly what it (euphemistically) sounds like.

Now, Madame Kovarian’s version (plus the sing-song stanza added at the very end of Closing Time) gives us a bit more:

Tick tock goes the clock
And what then shall we play?
Tick tock goes the clock
Now summer’s gone away

Tick tock goes the clock
And all the years they fly
Tick tock and all too soon
Your love will surely die

Tick tock goes the clock
He cradled her and he rocked her
Tick tock goes the clock
‘Till River kills the Doctor

Which gives us the new lines ‘Your love will surely die’ and ’till River kills the Doctor’. Now, one thing that I find interesting about these rhymes is that none of them preclude the possibility of ‘the Doctor’ being River Song. In fact, at the end of Closing Time Madame Kovarian even makes a big deal of pointing out that ‘they made [River] a doctor today’. Now, practically speaking we know River doesn’t die in the next episode (because she dies in the Library), but it’s a fun theory because it very nearly fits the poem. And River could very well die and be revived, much like the Doctor seems to have done in Let’s Kill Hitler.

I don’t in any way expect this theory to pan out. Also, I appear to have been wrong about River killing Rory, which is a shame, because I liked the misdirection that would have been at play if it were true. Oh well.

Oh, and finally, the prequel for the Wedding of River Song gives us:

Doctor, brave and good
He turned away from violence
When he understood
the fooling of the Silence

This rhyme is interesting. The combination of the Doctor ‘turning away from violence’ and the Silence being fooled implies that the Silence are pawns in someone else’s game (Madame Kovarian is certainly a good contender). So, we’ll see where that leads; I really like the idea of the Doctor working *with* the Silence; that image is striking and appropriately mythic, somehow.

Oh, and one more note: even Kovarian’s recited legend can be made to fit my River-kills-herself theory:

By Silencio Lake, on the plain of size
An impossible astronaut will rise from the deep
And strike the Time Lord dead

Since River is somewhat analogous to a ‘Time Lord’, as per both the Doctor’s comments and our observations of River.

Still, this is all admittedly and intentionally far-fetched, and I don’t care to do a lot of actual prediction for The Wedding of River Song. I want this one to just surprise me, and to sit back and enjoy the ride. And from the trailer, it looks like it will be a fairly light-hearted action-filled ride instead of a dark, scary, tense story like the opener was.

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Puzzle Log: MGWCC #172 – The Vision Thing

2011.09.22 at 14:00 · Filed under Puzzles ·Tagged , , ,

I have a strange relationship with crossword puzzles. I like the idea of them, but I’m often rubbish at them. However, after solving a very fun, simple(ish) crossword in 7 minutes the other day, my desire to solve them was rekindled. So I decided to tackle Matt Gaffney’s latest Weekly Crossword Contest.

The MGWCC is a weekly crossword, fairly difficult as non-cryptics go, that always has a meta-puzzle at the end. He publishes them on Friday and accepts answers to the meta (via email) until Tuesday. They are often very difficult, but I managed to get this one in about an hour and a half (45 minutes for the crossword, 45 minutes for the meta).

A couple of notes on how I handle crosswords:

I use xword, and I use its timer feature, which pauses (and hides the puzzle) when you go to another window. As a result, I know how long I spend actively working on the puzzle, even if I’m multitasking while I’m working on it. For instance, I did this puzzle in 2 sessions over 2 days, and the total time I was nominally working on the crossword was an hour and a half. But only about half that time was spent actually working on the puzzle.

You could argue that my mind is still pretty engaged with the puzzle during the multitasking, though. So, if you prefer, I spent 1.5 hours in wall time on the puzzle, and 45 minutes of game clock time.

I also use Google, but only as a last resort; I prefer to use the other clues available to fill in unknowns. But when all else fails, I will google a clue that satisfies both of these conditions:

  1. I know I will never guess the answer on my own.
  2. The entry is in a position that will help me continue to solve without further googling.

I do occasionally refer to googling answers as ‘cheating’; I’m not denigrating anyone who solves their crosswords that way, it just feels to me like I’m cheating myself a little bit.

A maze of twisty letters, all alike

And on that note, this week’s MGWCC was brutal. I had to cheat 5 times, which is unusually high for this size puzzle (15×15). There was very little short fill, and lots of obscures references. The NE and SW corners were really hard to break into, and that’s where most of my cheats came from. At least there was almost nothing sports-related (I’m rubbish at those), though. And the clue “Palindromic play” with the answer RUR made me squee a little.

Other fun answers were OJIBWA, ANTARES, and SECRETES. SWE took me far longer than it should have, given that I know how crosswords and abbreviations work. I’m definitely out of practice. Also frustrating were the three entries all clued ‘Dot follower’, all 3-letter entries. Clearly DNS TLDs, but which ones? When I saw those length 3 entries, I was hopeful for some fill to help ground the rest of the puzzle, but those were literally impossible to solve without getting crossings on them first.

But other than that, this was a pretty straightforward 45-minute puzzle for me. Fun to solve, but on the difficult side of things. The meta, on the other hand, was a blast.

The meta clue (given in each week’s write up) is “a European capital I’ve never laid eyes on”. The puzzle title and the long entry BLINDCROSSING clued that this had to do with blindness. BRAILLE suggested trying to read the spaces as braille, but I couldn’t make that work (and I tried a lot of different rotations, encodings, and far-fetched interpretations of braille).

So, then I thought that the clue ISEEA could be involved. I found all the clues with the letters S, E, and E, and removed those letters (taking away the ‘SEE’ing). Those clues were:

ISEEA
SECRETES
DESSERT

which gave me:

IACRTESDERT

Which is an anagram for CREATES DIRT. But that is not a European city, as far as I know.

Then I spotted ‘HOMER’ as one of the answers. Homer (the Greek poet, who incidentally isn’t the person referenced by the clue) was supposedly blind. And Ray CHARLES and Stevie WONDER are in here too! Let’s find all the blind people:

John MILTON, Art TATUM, Louis BRAILLE (duh!), and SAMSON.

None of the clues reference the blind individual who shares the name; that would have made the meta too obvious. But the meaning of BLINDCROSSING is pretty obvious now, because of these 7 names, we have 3 pairs that cross. I think someone is missing. CHARLES doesn’t have a cross.

NEDLER and CHE cross CHARLES. NEDLER was a bit of a guess, so I go back and google this one (technically a 6th cheat, but I don’t usually count corrections during the meta. Metas are a different class of puzzle and googling doesn’t feel like cheating on them to me). Turns out the name should have been KELLER.

Taking just the 4 letters where these names cross, we have: MERO, or as it is more commonly known, ROME.

Well, that was a lot of fun! I may have to start doing one of these every week.

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Doctor Who: The God Complex

2011.09.19 at 17:15 · Filed under Media ·Tagged , , , ,

Spoiler Warning. You know the drill.

Jekyll is a very dark series. It possesses Moffat’s characteristic witty one-liners, and his characteristic brilliant building of dramatic tension. It even has a few moments that directly parallel some of the storytelling techniques Moffat has used in Doctor Who – in particular, the scene where Jekyll and Hyde talk to each other via video camera has echoes of the Doctor’s conversation with Sally Sparrow in Blink.

But it’s also very clearly not his best work – there are moments where the pacing lags significantly, and the story feels disjointed at times, especially in the early episodes. The latter portions of the series have their own problems, with enormous plot holes opening up beneath the narrative in a way that really gives it problems. For instance, Mrs. Utterson’s motivations are never really clear, especially in light of Jackman’s mother’s assertion that ‘Hyde is love’. And Tom’s children being able to ‘swap’ is never really explored in a meaningful way; I’m not normally an advocate for Chekhovian minimalism, but that just feels sloppy. However, by that point the pacing has picked up enough to gloss over a lot of the plot holes, and with characteristic Moffat lines (‘Trust me, I’m a psychopath’ was especially brilliant) to distract us, the story manages to just barely hold itself together.

The ending, though, and by that I mean the final frame before the show cuts to black, was utterly terrifying. It was a clever subversion of what we expect in narrative; after we thought we were safe in the denouement, we’re given a sudden jolt of adrenaline right as we cut to black. It takes away the feeling of satisfaction and leaves the audience with a slightly disappointed feeling. And it seems to do this very intentionally; I’m reminded of the similar subversive techniques I talked about in The Girl Who Waited. In fact,

Oh dear, I’ve reviewed the wrong series again, haven’t I? Terribly sorry about that.

The God Complex has a very interesting relationship with fear.

I didn’t expect Jekyll to be scary. So I urged my wife to watch it with me. And when it turned scary, I had to apologize to her, because she really dislikes scary television, and will be jumpy (and nightmare-prone) for days after a scary scene. It’s why she doesn’t watch Doctor Who. And she asked me why anyone would want to watch things that are meant to scare them.

And the answer to that question parallels some of the elements in this story. Basically: we watch scary things because it lets us master them. Television and film let us take our fears, reduce them to two dimensions – to a medium where we know they cannot touch us – and then face them. So what we’re left with (those of us who like scary stories, anyway) is the adrenaline rush without the real terror, and a sense of elation and power. We can practice being brave without any real danger. And when we’re done, we can leave the scary stuff behind, safe in the Land of Fiction. And we can laugh at it, and joke about it, and reduce it thereby. (Of course, it’s never really gone. The Dark is always scary, and always real, and stories are just a lie we tell ourselves to feel better)

In The God Complex, we have a creature that takes the thing we’re most afraid of, and confronts us with it. But unlike most stories that start out with that premise, this creature doesn’t feed on our fear, it feeds on our faith, on the things we fall back on to make ourselves feel brave. It takes the very reason we watch scary stories and perverts it, and devours us. This is what makes the jagged transitions between the linear narrative and scenes of the victims laughing and screaming so effective.

This link to television is echoed in the repeated use of black-and-white camera feeds throughout the story. This feels very much like the Second Doctor, with his penchant for staring out of cameras and right at the viewer. The feeling is especially strong in the scene where the Doctor is talking to Rita.

On the subject of past Doctors, this is very much another Seventh Doctor story. And it’s easy to see it coming, but it’s still played very well. Specifically, the climax of this story bears an uncanny, unmissable resemblance to the climax of The Curse of Fenric. Except, as a friend pointed out to me, it is crucial to note that in Fenric, the Doctor didn’t believe the things he said to Ace. But he very clearly does believe every word he tells Amy. It is one of the most emotionally powerful scenes in Moffat’s Doctor Who to date. (Well, obviously “I stole your childhood and now I’ve led you by the hand to your death” isn’t true in the present tense (since his goal was to destroy Amy’s faith in him), but it does reflect the fear that leads him to stop travelling with Amy and Rory.)

So, it is a shame that it is marred by an obvious flaw. And that flaw is the phrase “Amy Williams”. I have no idea how that line of dialogue got out of the gate. I mean, it is clear what Whithouse is trying to say here: that it is time, basically, for Amy to grow up and stop having adventures with the Madman in a Box. It is meant to contrast with Amelia Pond, the little girl who wasted her childhood waiting for the Doctor.

But that’s not how it comes across, for a couple of reasons. First, the changing of surnames for women is culturally loaded. What we get instead is a paternal figure performing the ancient ritual of ‘giving away’ his daughter. It reeks of a transfer of possession, and objectifies Amy in a very direct way.

On a more significant, personal level, it is a reversal of an established story device that seems to have been unceremoniously dropped at some point in series 6. Amy’s role as a fairly dominant force in her relationship with Rory (in a way that very nearly has D/s overtones) is well established in series 5, and there are even references to Rory taking Amy’s name (so, Rory Pond, not Amy Williams). It is, in fact, the Doctor who establishes Rory as Rory Pond in the first place:

The Doctor: Amelia, from now on, I shall be leaving the… kissing duties to the brand new… Mr. Pond!
Rory: No! I’m not Mr. Pond. That’s not how it works.
The Doctor: Yeah it is.
Rory: … Yeah, it is.

This is further referenced in the Christmas Special, with the Doctor’s missive ‘Come Along Ponds’. But, at some point, Rory started being Rory Williams again. I suspect this might be related to Amy becoming pregnant/captured/a mother, in which case it is doubly troubling, because it echoes a cultural narrative that tells us that motherhood is the defining line where women have to ‘grow up and settle down’, which is equated in this narrative to ‘stop being assertive’.

So, here the Doctor seems to invert an observation he himself made about Amy. I think the intent may have been to demonstrate that he is trying to undo (some of) the changes he made in her life, but it comes across as a statement that she should be less assertive. And why not? That’s what we expect of women who have grown up, after all.

In short, they really missed the mark they were trying to hit with that line, and subverted an established aspect of Amy’s role as a strong female character.

And while we’re talking about criticisms, at first I felt that the character development from The Girl Who Waited was completely dropped. It felt like everything from that episode was suddenly water under the bridge for the three companions. There are a couple of points where this is not true: certainly the Doctor’s anguish about not wanting to kill his companions was influenced by the death of old Amy. And, and a friend pointed out to me, Rory’s use of the past tense when talking about travelling with the Doctor makes it clear that he is done with the Doctor and is just waiting for Amy to agree. But Amy, whose ‘Where is she?’ was the last thing we heard in the previous episode, seems to be relatively unaffected by those events. It’s an unfortunate tonal mismatch with the previous episode, given how well this episode works otherwise.

And the episode really does work. The visual storytelling here is fantastic, playing with techniques that aren’t seen much (if at all) in Doctor Who. We have the psychological scenes that break from the narrative to cut-up clips of text and disjointed images of the victims. There’s the use of cameras and camera feeds to structure the narrative and emphasize the nature of the danger. Throughout the episode we get a distinct downplaying of the monsters in the rooms and even the Minotaur; instead, the fear is purely psychological, with the lingering shots focusing on the victims as they are driven mad. Whithouse really knows how to write a Doctor Who script, and Moffat’s production team is doing unparalleled work here.

Praise Them.

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EA Origin, or: a Case Study in bad consumer experience

2011.09.15 at 19:00 · Filed under Technology ·Tagged , , , ,

I don’t play The Sims. The premise holds a certain amount of appeal for me, and the franchise’s quirky sense of humour and artistic style agree with my aesthetic sense, but something about the gameplay – the ebb and flow of action and the effort/reward cycle the game creates – doesn’t quite gel into an experience that I enjoy.

But my wife, she loves The Sims. She has sunk at least as many hours into The Sims 3 as I have in Starcraft 2 and Civ 5 combined. She owns every major expansion that’s been released, as well as The Sims Medieval and its expansion.

So when her Sims 3 update failed halfway through, leaving the game in an unlaunchable state, she was understandably distressed. The game plus all of its expansions requires a lot of effort to reinstall; we’d be looking at several hours of installing, with user prompts spaced just far enough apart to make doing anything else impractical.

So, we researched the issue and discovered that the EA Download Manager needed to be updated before The Sims 3 could be updated. Now, EA doesn’t make it terribly clear that the Download Manager is a separate application; it is usually launched from The Sims launcher, and is skinned to look like any other menu in The Sims when this is done. So, we found and updated the EA Download Manager.

And it turned into EA Origin.

Again, nothing told us this was going to happen, it just popped up an EA Origin installer, without telling us what Origin was, why we needed it, or why it started installing it when we were trying to update EA Download Manager.

Some further googling revealed that EA Origin is the new replacement for the Download Manager, and that it (gods help us) is “our new digital playground”. Apparently it is EA’s attempt at Yet Another Online Distribution System. With social features! Look, EA, I hate to break it to you, but Valve already one that battle conclusively. We need another Games For Windows Live about as much as we need arsenic.

The fact that nothing told us, at any point during this process, what EA Origin was or why it was being installed is a huge oversight. The user shouldn’t have to use Google to figure out what the product you’re giving them is. This is a terribly sloppy user experience.

But it’s still not insurmountable. So, rolling our eyes, we proceed to install it, and then we go back and launch The Sims 3.

It launches EA Origin instead.

Why has this happened? Perhaps Origin serves as the new launcher? Okay, that’s fine – another crappy application sitting in the system tray, but we can at least live with this. Let’s just launch The Sims 3 through Origin.

What’s worse, EA Origin wants us to create a profile before it will let us do anything. This is obnoxious – yesterday, The Sims 3 would just launch and let us be happy. Plus, we already have a login on The Sims website, which is where you go to purchase downloadable content for the game. So this is Yet Another Login to Remember, and that’s annoying. With absolutely no warning, EA has added a ton of requirements that prevent us from playing a game that has worked fine on its own. Still, whatever. Let’s make this profile, get this over with.

Now we can just launch The Sims 3 from here, right?

Click. Click. Nothing happens.

Did we do something wrong? Is our profile not acceptable? Is EA just not that into us any more? We close origin, launch it again, try The Sims again. Still nothing. After a few more minutes of troubleshooting, we give it the old Windows solution – we reboot the machine.

When we get back to Windows and launch The Sims again, it launches perfectly, without seeming to care about EA Origin. It’s like nothing ever happened, and everything works just fine. The old Download Manager interface is even still there, and allows us to update the system. Apparently it just wanted Origin for authentication, or something?

But even though this story has a happy ending, there are still troubling implications here. EA did a very poor job of informing the user about what was happening here, leaving us to guess and google and hope that things would end up working. This was a very stress-inducing experience, which is not what you want when you sit down to play a game.

Also, the fact that they retroactively tied a single-player game into an online distribution platform seems both unnecessary and potentially problematic. When we bought the game, we did not do so with the understanding that an Internet connection was necessary for authentication or activation, for instance. We didn’t agree to have the game tied in to an account that may prevent us from updating if it is ever suspended or deleted for some reason (and these things happen; no system is free of errors). While we don’t have any reason to suspect that the game would become *unplayable* in the absence of Origin, this is still troubling.

In a post like this, I would, at this point, customarily make a plea to the company in question to be better, to stop disappointing its users, to be more transparent and try to foster trust. But I’m not going to bother. Because EA has proven themselves time and again to be unwilling to hear those pleas. Instead, I’m going to close with a question.

EA, what happened to you?

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Doctor Who: The Girl Who Waited

2011.09.13 at 17:45 · Filed under Media ·Tagged , ,

As always, Spoiler Warning.

I didn’t have high hopes for this episode. From the previews, I got the impression that the story was going to go something like this: Amy gets trapped in an accelerated time stream. The Boys™ repeatedly try (and fail) to save her, while she repeatedly grows older, until finally they use techno-magic to undo the ageing and fly off into the Time Vortex toward their next adventure. In the middle, we would get some action sequences and some Rory-and-Amy-love-each-other-so-much-and-isn’t-that-just-so-fucking-sweet sequences.

And I felt justified in this impression. After all, Tom MacRae’s previous effort for Doctor Who was The Rise of the Age of Steel Cybermen, a disappointing romp to a parallel universe that re-introduced the Cybermen to New Who. This didn’t bode well for a story in which the central premise appeared to be ‘Amy needs to be rescued’.

But, look… Mr. MacRae, I’m sorry I doubted you. I’m sorry I judged you on Rise of the Cybermen. Because you most certainly can write a good episode of Doctor Who.

This episode is good. On a lot of levels. The dialogue is unrelentingly dark, tense, urgent; the only comedy we get is in the first act. After that it is a downright brutal story. Because MacRae took a story that looked like (and could have been) “Amy needs to be rescued” and he turned it into “Amy doesn’t get rescued”. The result is what feels, to me, like an attempt at a Feminist critique of the Damsel in Distress story. And it does a pretty good job.

So, Amy doesn’t get rescued. Instead, she spends 36 years stuck in a Tower, not being rescued. And this Tower has an endless supply of faceless robots that want to kill her. So she does the only thing that anyone who could survive for 36 years alone in a Tower of Death could do: she gets tough. She may still be trapped, but she saves herself.

And the Amy we get to see here gives us a lot to admire. She can fight, she can hack (I’m using that term very charitably here. After all, computers are bound to be a bit wibbly-wobbly in Doctor Who), build a sonic probe, and she seems to be a genuinely strong female character. The fact that she is filled with bitterness and hatred towards Rory and the Doctor comes across as a realistic consequence of spending three decades in isolation. The venom with which Karen Gillan utters the phrase ‘Raggedy Man’ really sells Amy’s hatred of the doctor, and her later conversation with him really illustrates her character:

And there he is, the voice of God. Survive, ’cause no one’s gonna come for you. You taught me that… Don’t you lecture me, Blue Box man flying through time and space on a whimsy. All I’ve got, all I’ve had for thirty-six years, is cold, hard reality.

Then we have Rory’s reactions. The narrative makes it clear that he is torn between the young and old Amys. The line “Leave her and take you?” is voiced with outright contempt, but shortly after that, he appears more sympathetic, and by the end of the episode is heartbroken at the prospect of leaving her behind.

But, crucially, he does leave her behind. And this brings us to the Feminist overtones that this episode takes on. A core message that you can extrapolate from this story is this: If you trust men, they will lie to you and betray you. Especially if there’s a younger, prettier option nearby. They may feel bad about doing it, they may have so many justifications they’ve sold themselves, but in the end, they betray you. The men here don’t just fail to save Amy, they actively refuse. And why? Why does Rory choose young Amy? Because an Amy with decades of resentment and anger is less compatible with him. Because it isn’t his Amy. The implication is clear: a woman’s personhood is worth less than a woman’s utility to her man.

Another thing to consider is why it is Rory’s choice in the first place. The Doctor emphasizes that Rory has the choice. He could choose his young, perky, conventionally pretty wife, or his old, disillusioned, angry, bitter wife. And the Amys have no agency in the decision. This is Rory’s choice, because it’s Rory’s wife we’re talking about. Despite all the talk of Amy Pond as a fierce, independent, and wilful character, here she is conveniently scripted out so that the men in her life can decide which version of her gets to be saved.

The thing is, the story manages to pull all of this off. Yes, this has strongly sexist underpinnings in a way that makes all the other Feminist complaints about Moffat’s Who seem to pale in comparison. But MacRae doesn’t shy away from them. Rory knows he’s being a selfish ass. Darvill delivers a superb performance here, and Amy’s final line in the episode (and the way we cut away from it abruptly) underlines it. We are not supposed to feel like Rory and the Doctor are the good guys here. This is a bold statement, and it is complex and morally ambiguous storytelling in a way we haven’t really seen in Doctor Who since Sylvester McCoy.

And speaking of Sylvester McCoy, well. This whole episode has a very strong Seventh Doctor underpinning, the same way The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People was a modern Second Doctor story. Matt Smith is playing a much darker, harder Doctor here. I was reminded of this line in the New Adventures novel Conundrum:

“But that’s the whole point, though, isn’t it?” said Ace. “To the Doctor, it did mean nothing. Just another of his games, another upset in the universe to be dealt with and then chucked.”

That quote summarizes the Seventh Doctor better than any description I could possibly muster. Notably, that isn’t the totality of the Doctor, but it is an accurate description of his practical relation to, and effect on, other people.

And here, Eleven acts in much the same way. Rory’s accusatory “You’re turning me into you” validates this reading; in the same novel, Ace explains that the reason she stays with the Doctor is that she’s gotten a taste for the same manipulative games the Doctor plays.

In this story, there is notably an entire scene that happens off-screen: when old Amy has the glasses, she has a conversation with the Doctor (in which she cries) that we are not privy to. I suspect this is the tie-in to the ongoing story arc for this episode: the Doctor tells old Amy something, and I suspect it is about the events prior to the tuxedo scene in Let’s Kill Hitler. Whatever it is, it makes her cry, and I have a suspicion that it is the thing that convinces her to accept death at the end of the episode.

Because that’s the one strange beat to this episode; old Amy eventually accepting her betrayal seems outright unlikely to me. So either that’s a weak character beat, or she has learned something about young Amy’s (potential) future that makes her change her mind. I’m hoping for the latter, because it will make this story feel that much stronger once the ongoing arc plays out. And there are no other ongoing arc references in this story, which was good after the heavy-handed, tacked-on reference at the end of the previous episode.

So, in the final analysis, I think this story is good on every level. The things I haven’t talked about – pacing, dialogue, camerawork – have only been omitted because they all functioned well for the story. There’s nothing there to criticize. There’s actually quite a bit to praise, especially regarding the cinematography and visual aesthetics in this episode, but this review is already feeling a bit hefty, so I’ll leave off here. See you next week!

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More thoughts on the Escapist

2011.09.07 at 18:00 · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

I’ve talked about the Escapist before. Specifically, when I mentioned I would no longer be visiting their website. My reasons then were essentially practical – they had simply made viewing content more annoying than it was worth.

Recent events, however, are making me re-evaluate that post. In that post, I didn’t really analyze why the Escapist had such awful ads. But now I think it’s worth doing. The most obvious explanation, which was more or less implicit in my earlier angry rant, is that the annoying, screen-filling, content-swamping ads didn’t show up because of incompetent programming or oversight, but rather through a complete disregard for the consumer.

The Escapist (well, Themis Media) is a company. Companies exist to make money. Basic economics. Themis media makes money by selling advertisements; the more advertisements they can get to viewers, the more their advertisements will be worth to advertisers, the more advertisements they can sell, and the more money they make. Again, nothing ground-breaking here, just basic mathematics.

There are two basic ways to get these ads to the eyes of more viewers (and thus up their potential value, increasing profits): show more or larger ads per page, or attract more viewers (to create more page views). As a company that wants to Maximize Profits™, ideally they want to do a whole lot of both of these things.

The problem is that these two goals are counter to each other. The more (or more obvious) ads you display, the more people will start to say ‘too many ads, see you later’. Like I did in my previous post on the subject. The trick, and the thing that most websites eventually figure out, is that there is an equilibrium – a quantity and size of advertisements that will not produce a significant hit on the number of viewers you attract.

Now, the way to actually attract more viewers is to have content that people want to view. And the Escapist has been damn good at this. They have a great deal of very good content, much of which is very popular. They have attracted a lot of grade A talent to work for them. And that may be the problem – they’ve got such good content, their equilibrium point has tipped so far that they can pull off obnoxious full-screen ads without driving away a significant number of users.

However, at some point, the volume of ads you display becomes anti-consumer. There’s a point where you are failing your customers, where suggesting that what you are asking is a ‘reasonable price to pay’ for the content is farcical. Many modern magazines have fallen prey to this: I flipped through a fashion magazine recently, for instance, and counted 12 pages of ads before reaching the table of contents. That’s patently absurd, and what it shows is that the company that produces the product cares more about money than they do about the consumer’s experience.

But all of that was an overly long prelude to what I really want to talk about: Themis is now being accused of being anti-creator as well. Extra Credits, one of the Escapist’s video features, has left the Escapist, with some very troubling accusations about Themis’ payment practices. Basically, the Extra Credits crew says they haven’t been paid for a long time, and that Themis is claiming that Extra Credits owes *them* money from a fund raiser that they ran to keep the show alive (and to finance surgery for their artist).

Now, in fairness, Themis has some counter-claims, which are enumerated at the second link above. However, given Themis’ anti-consumer ad practices, I don’t have much difficulty believing that they might be willing to cheat their creative people as well. Of course, this doesn’t constitute proof of wrongdoing on their part, but it is certainly useful to observe that they already have a pattern of preferring money to delivering a good experience.

Of course, the upshot of all this, for us consumers, is that Extra Credits is no longer encumbered by the horrible pit of a website that is The Escapist. So I watched the most recent episode. Based on this one episode, it seems like a pretty good show: smart and engaging, with enough humour scattered throughout to keep it from feeling dry. They point out a lot of things that may be obvious to (some) people in the industry, but that many individual gamers are unlikely to have ever had reason to consider.

I’ll probably watch it regularly now that I don’t have to risk a stress headache just to watch it.

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Doctor Who: Night Terrors

2011.09.06 at 16:00 · Filed under Media ·Tagged

As usual with these posts, Spoiler Warning.

Oh, Mark Gatiss, you’ve done it again. You got my hopes up, and then dashed them against the rocky shore of poor plotting.

Let’s start with a recap of Gatiss’ contributions to (televised) Doctor Who: The Unquiet Dead, The Idiot’s Lantern, Victory of the Daleks, and now Night Terrors. So, out of his previous contributions we have one very, very good (and fairly creepy) episode, one that is, for my money, an absolute dud, and one that is a fairly clever idea with a weak execution. Although, to be fair, a Dalek asking “WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA?” might be one of the greatest single moments in Doctor Who history, and if Victory of the Daleks was conceived around that image, then I forgive it for everything else.

Looking at his track record, I get the impression that Gatiss is at his best when he tries to write creepy stories. The problem is that, with Night Terrors, he is trying to write a creepy story. But try as it might, this story absolutely fails to be creepy. The wooden dolls just aren’t compellingly scary, and the dollhouse doesn’t have the atmosphere of ‘creepy haunted house’ that it needs to make them so. The only time the dolls are ever creepy is the first time we see one – that is, when it is inanimate and standing alone in a closet. The monster is less scary when we can look it in the face, and the longer we hear creepy noises and get suggestions of scary things, the more suspense and tension is built. Here, though, Gatiss fails to build suspense for the monster, so its reveal feels about as frightening as the Slitheen in Aliens of London. Even the build-up to the Silurian reveal in The Hungry Earth was creepier than this episode.

With scary out the window, let’s look at the rest of the episode. This is the first episode since The Doctor’s Wife that isn’t heavily invested in the story arc (even if we didn’t know how tied to the story The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People was, in retrospect we have to count them as fundamentally ‘part of the ongoing arc’ episodes), so I had high hopes for a nice, self-contained, Doctor-to-the-rescue story.

And the opening let me keep hoping. Gatiss writes the Doctor brilliantly. The sequence in which the Doctor and company wander about the tenement has some fantastic dialogue. And every scene with the Doctor interacting with George and Alex is brilliant as well.

But these scenes are interspersed with the dollhouse. And the way the dollhouse is used destroys the pacing and tension of the episode. At the end of the episode, it felt like not very much had happened, and what had happened was inconsequential. The big runaround gets resolved, essentially, by actors coming on stage at the last minute. It’s trying to be a clever twist, but it ends up being an anticlimax.

And the story arc tie-in at the end felt a bit weak, too. I mean, we get some creepy child-like singing that is, presumably, supposed to evoke the monsters that were just defeated. But even if we set aside the fact that they are, y’know, defeated, they have absolutely no apparent reason to know or care about the Doctor’s death. They’re figments of an alien child’s imagination. It felt like that was added just for the sake of having some reminder of the overall story arc. Whether that was added by Moffat or Gatiss, it is a weak bit of storytelling.

One thing it does do is tell us that the storyline surrounding the Doctor’s death will probably be dealt with in series 6, and not carried over to series 7. At least, assuming Moffat is following the contemporary format of series-spanning story arcs; dropping repeated hints about the same plot element almost always means that element will be dealt with in the series finale. Unless, of course, the series finale ends on a cliffhanger. But Doctor Who is uniquely ill-suited to the Dallas-style inter-series cliffhanger, because the Christmas Specials interrupt the dramatic tension period.

There is one other thing I do want to praise about the episode, though: George has a dollhouse, and no one thinks this is odd, or makes disparaging remarks about it. That struck me as a nice nod to gender-neutral parenting.

Next week, we have The Girl Who Waited, which I will admit now I’m not looking forward to, given that the plot appears to be ‘Amy is captured and’. After A Good Man Goes To War, I had really hoped we would be able to stop putting the girl in the fridge quite so often. But it looks like the writers still can’t seem to work that out of their system, so here we go again…

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