Further Exciting Consulting Opportunitues
I am expanding the offerings of my consulting company,we now offer a second service, which is this:
When someone is making, say, an eight season of a tv show for a streaming service, they can come to me and tell me what events will take place in those eight episodes. And then I will say,
“That is four episodes, max. What do ya got lying around that you’re saving for the second season? Let’s jam that in there too.”
This Adam Savage Video
The YouTube algorithm has decided that what I really want to watch are Adam Savage videos, and it turns out the robots are occasionally right? So, I’d like to draw your attention to this vid where Adam answers some user questions: Were Any Myths Deemed Too Simple to Test on MythBusters?
It quickly veers moderately off-topic, and gets into a the weeds on what kinds of topics MythBusters tackled and why. You should go watch it, but the upshot is that MythBusters never wanted to invite someone on just to make them look bad or do a gotcha, so there was a whole class of “debunking” topics they didn’t have a way in on; the example Adam cites is dowsing, because there’s no way to do an episode busting dowsing without having a dowser on to debunk.
And this instantly made clear to me why I loved MythBusters but couldn’t stand Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!. The P&T Show was pretty much an extended exercise in “Look at this Asshole”, and was usually happy to stop there. MythBusters was never interested in looking at assholes.
And, speaking of Adam Savage, did I ever link to the new Bobby Fingers?
This is relevant because it’s a collaboration with Adam Savage, and the Slow Mo Guys, who also posted their own videos on the topic:
Shooting Ballistic Gel Birds at Silicone Fabio with @bobbyfingers and @theslowmoguys!
75mph Bird to the Face with Adam Savage (@tested) and @bobbyfingers - The Slow Mo Guys
It’s like a youtube channel Rashomon, it’s great.
Tales of the Valiant
In order for this game to make sense, you have to remember why it exists at all. Tales of the Valiant is Kobold Press’ “lawyer-proof” variant of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, created as a response to the absolute trash fire Hasbro caused around the Open Game License and the 5th Edition System Reference Document early last year.
Recall that Hasbro, current owners of Dungeons & Dragons, started making some extremely hinky moves around the future of the OGL—the license under which 3rd party companies can make content compatible with D&D. Coupled with the rumors about the changes being planned for the 2024 update to the game, there was suddenly a strong interest in a version of 5th Edition D&D that was unencumbered by either the OGL or the legal team of the company that makes Monopoly. As such, Kobold Press stepped up to the plate.
Because history happens twice, the first as tragedy, the second as farce, this is actually our second runaround with D&D licensing term shenanigans spawning a new game.
For some context, when 3rd Edition D&D came out back in 2000, in addition to the actual physical books, the core rules were also published in a web document called the System Reference Document, or SRD, which was released under an open source–inspired license called the Open Gaming License, OGL. This was for a couple of reasons, but mostly to provide some legal clarity—and a promise of safe harbor—around the rules and terms and things, many of which were either taken from mythology or had become sort of “common property” of the TTRPG industry as a whole. The upshot was if you followed the license terms, you could use any material from the rules as you saw fit without needing to ask permission or pay anybody, and a whole industry sprung up around making material compatible with or built on top of the game.
When the 4th Edition came out in 2008, the licensing changed such that 3rd party publishers essentially had to choose whether to support 3 or 4, and the rules around 4 were significantly more restrictive. The economy that had grown up under the shade of 3rd edition and the OGL started, rightly, to panic a little bit. Finally, Paizo, who had been the company publishing Dungeon and Dragon magazines under license from Hasbro until just about the same time, stepped up, and essentially republished the 3.5 edition of D&D under the name “Pathfinder.”
There’s a probably apocryphal line from Paizo’s Erik Mona that they chose to create Pathfinder instead of just reprinting 3.5 because “if we’re going to go to the trouble of reprinting the core books we’re going to fix the problems”. (Which has always stuck in my mind because my initial reaction to flipping through the core Pathfinder book the first time was to mutter “wow, we had really different ideas about what the problems were”.) Because Pathfinder wasn’t just a reprint, it was also a collected of tweaks, cleanups, and revisions based on the collected experience of playing the game. There was a joke at the time that it was version “3.75”, but really is was more like “3rd Edition, 2.0”.
When 5th edition came out in 2014, it came with a return to more congenial 3rd edition–style licensing, which reinvigorated the 3rd party publisher world, and also led to an explosion of twitch stream–fueled popularity, and unexpectedly resulted in the most successful period of the game’s history, and now a decade later here we are again, with a different 3rd party publisher producing a new incarnation of a Hasbro game so that the existing ecosystem can continue to operate without lawyers fueled by Monopoly Money coming after them (and yes, pun intended.)
(This isn’t the only project spawned by last January’s OGL mess either; Paizo’s Pathfinder 2 “remaster” was explicitly started to remove any remaining OGL-ed text from the books, it’s not a coincidence that this is when Tweet & Heinsoo chose to kickstart a second edition of 13th Age, the A5E folks are doing their own version of a “lawyer-proof 5th edition.”)
However, Tales of the Valiant had to deal with a couple of challenge that Pathfinder didn’t—primarily, vast chunks of 5E just aren’t in the SRD.
The 3rd Edition SRD had, essentially, the entire game, minus a few minor details and trademarked names, including quite a bit a material published after the core books. For Pathfinder, Paizo could have taken the SRD, bound it as-is, and had a ready-to-play game.
The 5E SRD, on the other hand, has significantly less. Looking at that SRD, vast sections of the game are missing—every Class only has a single Subclass, there’s only a single example Background, there’s only a single Feat, the 5E rules for personality traits & roleplaying hooks—ideals, bonds, flaws, and so on—aren’t present, various monsters aren’t present, the Alchemist class isn’t there, nothing from any book other than the three original core books is there, only the “core” races are there and the races with subraces only have a single example, and so on and so on. All of these gaps needed filling with new material on top of the other mechanical tweaks and cleanup.
The result is that Tales of the Valiant ends up in a sort of “neither fish nor fowl” situation; it’s not just a cleaned up 5E because it literally can’t be, but on the other hand it’s not different enough to give it a clear hook or independent identity.
But with that out of the way, it’s pretty great.
The initial release for ToV is two books—a Players Guide and Monster Vault. (Supposedly, Hasbro has also been getting stropy about other companies using the name “Player’s Handbook” which is why both Kobold and Paizo have moved to other titles.)
The writing in both books is outstanding. This is all, broadly speaking, the same material as the 5E Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual, but every section is better written, clearer, generally shorter and more concise. It reads like someone took the original 5E books and ran them past a really, really good editor. All of the language has been made much clearer—for example, spell “levels” are now “circles” to avoid confusion with character levels.
Most of the changes are excellent. The whole thing reads like a set of well-presented house rules by a group of really good DMs who have been running this game for a decade, which I’m pretty sure is what it is.
However, for better or worse, it’s still 5E. All the weird edges of that game are still here—the strange economy around bonus actions, there’s still too many weird custom per-class mechanics around pools of dice, Bards are still mostly just junior wizards, the “other two” arcane spellcasters are still underbaked, there still isn’t a caster that just uses spellpoints.
There’s still just too much—too much complexity without getting anything for it. The core book is 370+ pages, which seems increasingly absurd.
It’s not a secret that 5E was game made by a small team on a short deadline, the game was barely finished, and as a result on a pretty regular basis the rules throw up their hands and depend on the DM to sort things out. As such, many of the changes feel like the result of a decade of people having figured things out— for example, the rules around tools vs skills are clearer, the list of tools is shorter, there are actual rules for hiding, the rules are all reorganized.
Other changes are more structural, but still in the “obvious fixes” category—every class gets subclasses starting at level 3 now, and at the same levels thereafter, although the many of the new subclasses have a certain “golden arcs” to 5E’s “golden arches” quality. For example, Mage Blades are now Spell Blades, and can mix cantrips with physical attacks when using multiattack, which is… pretty great, actually? And a couple of the classes, like Warlock, have been pretty extensively overhauled, with just regular-ass spell slots.
The big ticket changes are all improvements:
“Race” has been replaced with a dual system of “Lineage” and “Heritage”. Lineage is, essentially, your species, and Heritage is where you grew up. This immediately lets you easily cook up some unusual combo—urban Orcs, nomadic Halflings. Backgrounds work similarly to 5E, but the list is new and grant some actually useful bonuses. “Inspiration” has been replaced with the much more flexible and interesting “Luck”. Spell lists have been reorganized around 4E-style “power sources” instead of being unique per class. 5E’s optional Feats have been replaced with Talents, which are, effectively, 3E’s Feats. Like 3E, those Talents are everywhere; your background gives you one, you can pick them on a pretty regular basis as an upgrade option. This is one of several changes that brings back something from 3E. As another, magic items—and magic item upgrades— have prices again. And the revised text around using attributes and skills make them feel a lot more like how the 3E skills worked. I’ve often said my personal ideal version of D&D would be a 3E-5E hybrid, and ToV very much has that feeling.
And, thank goodness, alignment is gone.
(For the full list of changes, see: Tales of the Valiant: Conversion Guide )
The books themselves, like all of Kobold’s books, are very nice. For a small press, they’re outstanding. The usual full-size hardcovers, full color, nice layout, good art. As a nice touch, the covers of the two books represent the same scene, but a few minutes apart.
Uncharacteristically, my favorite of the two volumes was the Monster Vault. This is where the aspect of “collected house rules from a good DM” really shines. The layout is not that different from the 5E Monster Manual, but very cleverly rethought to be useful during play. Each monster gets at least a one whole page, with a nice piece of art and a really thoughtful layout of stats. For example, the book doesn’t waste space with the monster’s stats, it just lists their stat modifiers, which are also their saving throw modifiers. The monster name is always—and only—the first thing in the top left corner of the page, which makes the book so much easier to navigate than either 3rd or 5th edition’s “YOLO!” approach to page layouts.
Every creature gets at least half a column of description, and this is where removing alignment becomes an asset to design. Without alignment as a shorthand, they give each monster an actual personality. To wit: Red Dragons are still bad guys, but instead of just being “chaotic evil”, now they’re assholes. Continuing with the dragons as the example, the metallic ones are still mostly “good”, and the chromatic ones are “bad”, but each kind gets a distinct set of ticks and behaviors. Green dragons are now something like Nazi scientists, Copper dragons are friendly but love a fight, and so on. It’s a really solid set of role-play hooks and ways to deploy them in a game.
This also really shines as a way to distinguish things like oozes or creatures acting on instinct from monsters you’re going to fight because they thought about it and want to take your stuff.
And then there’s the section on encounter design. Encounter design in 5E is notoriously tricky, mainly because the “challenge rating” system in the core rules is blatantly untested and unfinished. The 5E books barely cover it, one more subsystem that ends with a shrug and “you can figure it out?” The ToV Monster Vault has pages and pages on how to design encounters, how to use the existing challenge ratings to compare opponents to the party’s level, notes on adjusting difficulty, you name it. It’s clearly the work of a group that’s played this game a lot, and have really figured out how to make this part sing.
It’s probably the best D&D-style “monster book” I’ve ever read.
The Player’s Guide is a little more of a mixed bag. Again, the layout is clear and well-thought, each class has an icon representing it when it comes up in the rules. Character creation is presented in a different order, which isn’t really better or worse, so much as it shows there just isn’t a best way to present 5E’s overly-complex material.
It also pulls in a bunch of material that 5E leaves in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Magic items, for example. It really is the only book you need to play the game, which makes me intensely curious about the ToV Gamemaster’s Guide which is coming out later this year.
But while the organization is different from the 5E Player’s Handbook, I’s be hard pressed to say it was better.
It’s also remarkable what isn’t here.
The section on “what is an RPG” is perfunctory to the point of being vestigial. There’s actually less material on role-playing and the like here than in the 5E books. There’s essentially nothing on how to actually play; there’s nothing here on how the authors intend this game to work in practice, I guess that’s left up to youtube?
There’s fewer mechanics for role play hooks than even 5E had. The thin-but-workable Ideals/Bonds/Flaws system wasn’t in the SRD, but hasn’t been replaced with anything. The section on using Charisma skills is basically the same content as the 5E book, and that was thin at time. (Meanwhile the 4E non-combat skill challenge system is just sitting there, waiting for someone to rediscover it.) (Edited to add: I went back and checked, and in fairness skill challenges were a DMG item in 4e, not in the PHB.)
There’s a section on Safety Tools, but it’s less than a page. The phrase “session zero” doesn’t appear anywhere in the book, which seems insane for a 300+ page RPG book published in the 2020s.
All of that would be acceptable in a small game, but this this book is 60 pages longer than the 5E book, which was already too big. And this isn’t the early teens anymore, where we were having serious conversations about if the TTRPG industry was going to keep existing. This is the twenties, and whatever else that means, TTRPGs are a huge business now, and narrative and character–focused play is in. It’s a strange set of oversights for an otherwise well-designed game.
Finally, Tales of the Valiant is… not a great name? It’s not terrible, but it’s a surprisingly hard name to use in a sentence. And that’s a lot of syllables. And something I’ve learned about myself over the last couple thousand words is that I can’t spell “Valiant” right the first time. (You know what’s a great RPG name? Mörk Borg. That’s the new bar, guys.)
But in case this hasn’t come through clearly, I like it. A lot. As it stands, it’s the best version of 5E out there. Well, at least for the moment, because the shadow of the incoming 5th edition update is looming on the horizon.
It’s not clear to me where this game sits in the broader hobby. Is there room for another D&D-alike? I’m not sure this makes a compelling case why you should play this instead of Pathfinder or 13th Age or the new 5E itself. I don’t understand who the target audience is supposed to be.
The folks that want to play Dungeons & Dragons are going to play that. The whole OGL trashfire/5th edition update ended up going a different direction than any of us expected a year ago; I think the ’24 update is going to be a lot better than we expected, the license terms actually got better, not worse, and I’m sure sure what the sales pitch is for “it’s like D&D, except slightly different.” There’s no hook, no “here’s why this is cooler.”
My overall response is that I wish Kobold had used Hasbro’s total surrender over the licensing to pivot, and to build up a more-different game. Pathfinder succeeded because 3rd edition went away and 4th edition, whatever its strengths, was a very different game. That not what happened this time, and a flavor of 5E is going to stick around for a while yet.
To be fair, I’m not really in the center of this particular crosshairs anymore either. I mean, the game I’m running now is a “cozy witchcore” modern fantasy game using the Cypher system, where we’ve never even bothered to fill in the player character’s attack bonuses on their character sheets. (Off topic but: it’s really fun to see what Modern Fantasy looks like once it has both “Lovecraft” and “90s goth vampires” washed completely out of its hair.) Thats miles away from D&D’s home turf of “fantasy-flavored superheros”. That said, we’ve got a D&D game we’re talking about kicking off, and if we do I’ll advocate heavily for using this instead.
And that’s the review in a nutshell: next time I want to run a game with Magic Missle in it, this is the one I’m going to run.
It’s a cool game by a cool company, making something good out of a stupid situation. Check it out.
Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (2002)
There are multiple interlocking tradegies of Douglas Adams’ death—not the least of which is the fact that he died at all. But also he passed at what appeared to be the end of a decade-long career slump—well, not slump exactly, but a decade where he seemed to spend his time being very, very irritated at the career he’d accidentally found.
After he died unexpectedly in May of 2001 at 49, his publisher rushed out a collection of previously unpublished work called Salmon of Doubt. It’s a weird book—a book that only could have happened under the exact circumstances that it did, scrambled out to take advantage of the situation, part collection, part funeral.
Douglas Adams is, by far, the writer whose had the biggest influence on my own work, and it’s not even close. I’m not even sure who would be number two? Ursula LeGuin, probably? But that’s a pretty distant second place—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the first “grown-up” book I ever read on my own, which is sort of my secret origin story.
As such I gulped Salmon down the instant it came out in 2002, and hadn’t read it since. There was a bit I vaguely remembered that I wanted to quote in something else I was working on, so I’ve recently bought a new copy, as my original one has disappeared over the years. (Actually, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what happened to it, but it’s a minor footnote in a larger, more depressing story, so lets draw a veil across it and pretend that it was pilfered by elves.)
Re-reading the book decades later, two things are very obvious:
First, Adams would never have let a book like this happen while he was alive. It’s self-indulgent in exactly the way he never was, badly organized, clearly rushed. I mean, the three main sections are “Life”, “The Universe”, and “And Everything”, which in addition to being obvious to the point of being tacky, is an absolutely terrible table of contents because there’s no rhyme or reason why one item is in one section versus another.
Second, a book like this should have happened years before. There was so much stuff Adams wrote—magazine articles, newspaper columns, bits and bobs on the internet—that a non-fiction essay collection–style book was long overdue.
This book is weird for other reasons, including that a bunch of other people show up and try to be funny. It’s been remarked more than once that no other generally good writer has inspired more bad writing that Douglas Adams, and other contributions to this book are a perfect example. The copy I have now is the US paperback, with a “new introduction” by Terry Jones—yes, of Monty Python—which might be the least funny thing I’ve ever read, not just unfunny but actively anti-funny, the humor equivalent of anti-matter. The other introductions are less abrasive, but badly misjudge the audience’s tolerance for a low-skill pastiche at the start of what amounts to a memorial service.
The main selling point here is the unfinished 3rd Dirk Gently novel, which may or may not have actually been the unfinished 6th Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel. However, that only takes about about 80 pages of a 290 page book; by my math thats a hair over a quarter, which is a little underwhelming. It’s clear the goal was to take whatever the raw material looked like and edit it into something reasonably coherent and readable, which it is. But even at the time, it felt like heavily-edited “grit-out-of-the-spigot” early drafts rather than an actual unfinished book, I’d be willing to bet a fiver that if Adams had lived to finish whatever that book turned into, none of the text here would have been in it. As more unfinished pieces have leaked out over the years, such as the excerpts in 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, it’s clear that there was a lot more than made it into Salmon, and while less “complete”, that other stuff was a lot more interesting. As an example, the excerpts from Salmon in 42 include some passages from one of the magazine articles collected here, except in the context of the novel instead of Adams himself on a trip? What’s the story there? Which came first? Which way did that recycling go? Both volumes are frustratingly silent.
It’s those non-novel parts that are actually good, though. That magazine article is casually one of the best bits of travel writing I’ve ever read, there’s some really insightful bits about computers and technology, a couple of jokes that I’ve been quoting for years having forgotten they weren’t in Hitchhiker proper. The organization, and the rushed nature of the compilation, make these frustrating, because there will be an absolutely killer paragraph on its own, with no context for where did this come from? Under what circumstances was this written? Similarly for the magazine articles, newspaper columns, excerpts from (I assume) his website; there’s no context or dates or backstory, the kinds of things you’d hope for in a collection like this. Most of them seem to date to “the 90s” from context clues, but it’s hard to say where exactly all these things fit in.
But mopst of what really makes the book so weird is how fundamentally weird Adams’ career itself was in the last decade of his life.
In a classic example of working for years to become an overnight success, Adams had a remarkably busy period from 1978–1984, which included (deep breath) two series of the Hitchhiker radio show, a revised script for the album version of the first series, a Doctor Who episode, a stint as Doctor Who’s script editor during which he wrote two more episodes—one of which was the single best episode of the old show—and heavily rewrote several others, the TV adaptation of Hitchhiker which was similar but not identical to the first radio series, the third Hitchhiker novel based (loosely) on a rejected pitch for yet another Doctor Who, and ending in 1984 with the near simultaneous release of the fourth Hitchhiker novel and the Infocom text adventure based on the first.
(In a lot of ways, HHGG makes more sense if you remember that it happened in the shadow of his work for Doctor Who, more than anything it functions as a satire of the older program, the Galaxy Quest to Who’s Star Trek, if you will. Ford is the Doctor if he just wanted to go to a party, Arthur is a Doctor Who companion who doesn’t want to be there and argues back, in the radio show at least, The Heart of Gold operates almost exactly like the Tardis. If you’ll forgive the reference, I’ve always found it improbable, that Hitchhiker found its greatest success in America at a time where Who was barely known.)
After all that, to steal a line from his own work, “he went into a bit of a decline.”
Somewhere in there he also became immensely rich, and it’s worth remembering for the rest of this story that somewhere in the very early 80s Adams crossed the line of “never needs to work again.”
Those last two projects in 1984 are worth spending an extra beat on. It’s not exactly a secret that Adams actually had very little to do with the Hitchhiker game other than the initial kickoff, and that the vast majority of the writing and the puzzles were Steve Meretzky doing an impeccable Adams impression. (See The Digital Antiquarian’s Douglas Adams, The Computerized Hitchhiker’s, and Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style for more on how all that happened.)
Meanwhile, the novel So Long and Thanks for All The Fish kicks off what I think of his middle period. It’s not really a SF comedy, it’s a magical realism romance novel that just happens to star the main character from Hitchhiker. It wasn’t super well received. It’s also my personal favorite? You get the feeling that’s the sort of direction he wanted to move in, not just recycling the same riffs from a decade earlier. There’s a real sense of his growth as an author. It also ties up the Hitchhiker series with a perfect ending.
Then a couple of more things happen. Infocom had a contract for up to six Hitchhiker games, and they really, really wanted to make at least a second. Adams, however, had a different idea for a game, which resulted in Infocom’s loved-by-nobody Bureaucracy, which again, Adams largely had nothing to do with beyond the concept, with a different set of folks stepping in to finish the project. (Again, see Bureaucracy at The Digital Antiquarian for the gory details.)
Meanwhile, he had landed a two book deal for two “non-Hitchhiker books”, which resulted in the pair of Dirk Gently novels, of which exactly one of them is good.
The first, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, is probably his best novel. It reworks a couple of ideas from those late 70s Doctor Whos but remixed in interesting ways. The writing is just better, better characters, funnier, subtler jokes, a time-travel murder-mystery plot that clicks together like a swiss watch around a Samuel Coleridge poem and a sofa. It’s incredible.
The second Dirk Gently book, Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, is a terrible book, full stop, and I would describe it as one of the most angry, bitter, nihilistic books I’ve ever read, except I’ve also read Mostly Harmless, the final Hitchhiker book. Both of those books drip with the voice of an author that clearly really, really doesn’t want to be doing what he’s doing.
(I’m convinced Gaiman’s American Gods is a direct riposte to the bleak and depressing Teatime.)
The two Dirk books came out in ’87 and ’88, the only time he turned a book around that fast. (Pin that.) After wrapping up the Dirk contract, he went and wrote Last Chance to See, his best book period, out in 1990.
Which brings us back around to the book nominally at hand—Salmon of Doubt. The unfinished work published here claims to be a potential third Dirk novel, and frankly, it’s hard to believe that was ever seriously under consideration. Because, look, the Gently contract was for two books, neither of which did all that well. According to the intro of this compilation, the first files for Salmon date to ’93, and he clearly noodled on and around that for a decade. That book was never actually going to be finished. If there was desire for a 3rd Gently novel, they would have sat him down and forced him to finish it in ’94. Instead, they locked him in a room and got Mostly Harmless.
There’s a longstanding rumor that Mostly Harmless was largely ghostwritten, and it’s hard to argue. It’s very different from his other works, mean, bad-tempered, vicious towards its characters in a way his other works aren’t. Except it has a lot in common with Bureaucracy which was largely finished by someone else. And, it has to be said, both of those have a very similar voice to the equally mean and bad-tempered Teatime. This gets extra suspicious when you consider the unprecedented-for-him turnaround time on Teatime. It’s hard to know how much stock to put into that rumor mill, since Adams didn’t write anything after that we can compare them to—except Last Chance which is in a completely different mood and in the same style as his earlier, better work. Late period style or ghostwriter? The only person alive who still knows hasn’t piped up on the subject.
Personally? I’m inclined to believe that Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was the last novel he wrote on his own, and that his contributions to both Teatime and Mostly Harmless were a sketch of an outline and some jokes. Which all, frankly, makes his work—or approximation thereof—over the course of the 90s even stranger.
In one of the great moments of synchronicity, while I was working on this, the Digital Antiquarian published a piece on Adams’ late period, and specifically the absolute mess of the Starship Titanic computer game, so rather than me covering the same ground, you should pause here and go read The Later Years of Douglas Adams. But the upshot is he spent a lot of time doing not very much of anything, and spawning at least two projects pawned off on others to finish.
After the garbage fire of Starship Titanic and then the strangely prescient h2g2—which mostly failed when it choked out on the the reams of unreadable prose that resulted from a horde of fans trying and failing to write wikipedia in the style of Adams’ guide entries—there was a distinct vibe shift. Whereas interviews with him in the mid 90s tended to have him say things like “I accidentally wrote a best-selling novel” and indicate a general dislike of novel writing as a profession, there seemed to be a thaw, a sense that maybe after a decade-plus resenting his found career, maybe he was ready to accept it and lean back in.
And then he died in the gym at 49.
One of the many maddening things about his death is that we never got to see what his late style would have looked like. His last two good books provide a hint of where he was heading.
And that’s the real value of Salmon of Doubt—the theoretical novel contained within would never have been finished in that form, the rest of the content is largely comprised of articles or blog posts or other trivialities, but it’s the only glimpse of what “Late Adams” would have looked like that we’ll ever get.
As a point of comparison, let continue getting side-tracked and talk about the guy who succeeded Adams as “the satirical genre writer beloved by nerds,” Terry Pratchett. Pratchett started writing novels about the same time Adams did, but as the saying goes, put the amount of energy into writing books that Adams spent avoiding writing them. He also, you know, lived longer, despite also dying younger than he should have. Even if we just scope down to Discworld, Pratchett wrote 40 novels, 28 of which were while Adams was also alive and working. Good Omens, his collaboration with Neil Gaiman, which is Discworld-adjacent at least, came out in 1990, and serves as a useful piece of temporal geography; that book is solidly still operating in “inspired by Douglas Adams” territory, and Pratchett wasn’t yet Terry Pratchett, beloved icon. But somewhere around there at the turn of the decade is where he stops writing comedy fantasy and starts writing satirical masterpieces. “What’s the first truly great Discworld novel?” is the sort of unanswerable question the old web thrived on, despite the fact that the answer is clearly Guards! Guards! from ’89. But the point here is that was book 8 after a decade of constant writing. And thats still a long way away from Going Postal or The Wee Free Men. We never got to see what a “Douglas Adams 8th Novel” looked like, much less a 33rd.
What got me thinking about this was I saw a discussion recently about whom of Adams or Pratchett were the better writer. And again, this is a weird comparison, because Pratchett had a late period that Adams never had. Personally, I think there’s very little Pratchett that’s as good as Adams at his peak, but Pratchett wrote ten times the number of novels Adams did and lived twenty years longer. Yes, Pratchett’s 21st century late period books are probably better than Adam’s early 80s work, but we never got to see what Adams would have done at the same age.
(Of course the real answer is: they’re both great, but PG Wodehouse was better than both of them.)
And this is the underlying frustration of Salmon and the Late Adams that never happened. There’s these little glimpses of what could have been, career paths he didn’t take. It not that hard to imagine a version of Hitchhiker that worked liked Discworld did, picking up new characters and side-series but always just rolling along, a way for the author to knock out a book every year where Arthur Dent encountered whatever Adams was thinking about, where Adams didn’t try to tie it off twice. Or where Adams went the Asimov route and left fiction behind to write thoughtful explanatory non-fiction in the style of Last Chance.
Instead all we have is this. It’s scraps. but scraps I’m grateful for.
This is where I put a horizontal line and shift gears dramatically. Something I’ve wondered with increasing frequency over the last decade is who Adams would have turned into. I wonder this, because it’s hard to miss that nearly everybody in Adams’ orbit has turned into a giant asshole. The living non-Eric Ide Pythons, Dawkins and the whole New Atheist movement, the broader 90s Skeptic/Humanist/“Bright” folks all went mask-off the last few years. Even the guy who took over the math puzzles column in Scientific American from Martin Gardner now has a podcast where he rails against “wokeists” and vomits out transphobia. Hell, as I write this, Neil Gaiman, who wrote the definitive biography of Adams and whose first novel was a blatant Adams pastiche, has turned out to be “problematic” at best.
There’s something of a meme in the broader fanbase that it’s a strange relief that Adams died before we found out if he was going to go full racist TERF like all of his friends. I want to believe he wouldn’t, but then I think about the casual viscousness with which Adams slaughtered off Arthur Dent in Mostly Harmless—the beloved character who made him famous and rich—and remember why I hope those rumors about ghostwriters are true.
The New Atheists always kind of bugged me for reasons it took me a long time to articulate; I was going to put a longer bit on that theme here, but this piece continues to be proof that if you let something sit in your drafts folder long enough someone else will knock out an article covering the parts you haven’t written yet, and as such The Defector had an absolutely dead-on piece on that whole movement a month or so ago: The Ghosts Of New Atheism Still Haunt Us. Adams goes (mercifully) unmentioned, but recall Dawkins met his wife—Doctor Who’s Romana II herself, Lalla Ward!—after Adams introduced the two of them at a party Adams was hosting, and Adams was a huge sloppy fan of Dawkins and his work.
I bring all this up here and now because one of the pieces in Salmon of Doubt is an interview of Adams by the “American Atheist”, credited to The American Atheist 37, No. 1 which in keeping with Salmon’s poor organization isn’t dated, but a little digging on the web reveals to be the Winter 1998–1999 issue.
It’s incredible, because the questions the person interviewing ask him just don’t compute with Adams. Adams can’t even engage on the world-view the American Atheists have. I’m going to quote the best exchange here:
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: Have you faced any obstacles in your professional life because of your Atheism (bigotry against Atheists), and how did you handle it? How often does this happen?
DNA: Not even remotely. It's an inconceivable idea.
One can easily imagine, and by “imagine” I mean “remember”, other figures from that movement going on and on about how poorly society treats atheists, and instead here Adams just responds with blank incomprehension. Elsewhere in the interview he dismissed their disconnect as a difference between the US and the UK, which is both blatantly a lie but also demonstrates the sort of kindness and empathy one doesn’t expect from the New Atheists. Every response Adams gives has the air of him thinking “what in the world is wrong with you?”
And, here in the twenties, that was my takeaway from reading Salmon again. It’s a book bursting with empathy, kindness, and a fundamentally optimistic take on the absurd world we find ourselves in. A guy too excited about how great things could be to rant about how stupid they are (or, indeed, to put the work into getting there.) A book full of things written by, fundamentally, one of the good guys.
If Adams had lived, I’m pretty sure three things would be true. First, there’d be a rumor every year this this was the year he was finally going to finish a script for the new Doctor Who show despite the fact that this never actually ends up happening. Second, that we never would have been able to buy a completed Salmon of Doubt. Third, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be on twitter asking people to define “a woman.”
In other words: Don't Panic.
More Musings on the Starcruiser
Over the various overlapping illnesses and convalescences of the last two months I finally caught up with the rest of the western hemisphere and made my way though Jenny Nicholson’s remarkable four-hour review/port-mortem of Disney’s “Galactic Starcruiser”—The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel.
It’s a outstanding piece of work, not only reviewing her own trip, but also providing context and some attempted root-cause analysis for the whole misbegotten project. Go carve out some time to watch it if you haven’t already. It’s the definitive work on the subject.
We’ve covered the Star Wars Hotel on Icecano before, but that was based on a trip report from someone whose trip went well. Nicholson’s trip didn’t go so well, and the ways systems fail often shed a lot more light on how they really function then when they work as intended.
The thing that has always stuck me about the Starcruiser is that it was so clearly three different attractions:
- A heavily-themed hotel with a direct “side-door” connection to the park
- A collection of low-barrier-to-entry interactive “games” somewhere between an arcade and an escape room
- A 2-day LARP summer camp with a stage show at the end
Those are all pretty good ideas, but why did they do them as one thing? All those ideas would have been so much cooler as an actual fancy hotel connected to the park, and then separately an EPCOT-style “Star Wars Pavillion”, in the style of the current space restaurant or the old The Living Seas “submarine base” you got into via the “Hydrolater”.
I thought Nicholson’s sharpest insight about the whole debacle was that all the “features” of the hotel were things originally promoted as being part of the main Star Wars Land, but the hotel allowed them to put them behind an extra paywall.
I maintain my belief I alluded to last summer that I don’t think the hotel was ever meant to last very long, it really does feel like a short-term experiment to try out a bunch of ideas and tech in a way where they can charge through the nose for access to the “beta”. So many strange decisions make more sense if you assume it was never meant to last for more than about 2 years. (But still! Why build it way out there instead of something you could turn into a more-permanent fixture?)
But that’s all old news; that was stuff we were speculating on before the thing even opened. No, what I’ve been stewing on since I watched this video was the LARP aspect. Nicholson’s video was the first thing I’d seen or read that really dug into what the “role play” aspect of the experience was like and how that worked—or didn’t. And I can’t believe how amateur-hour it was.
Credit where credit was due, Disney was going for something interesting: an open-to-the-public Diet LARP that still had actual NPC characters played by paid actors with storylines and semi-scripted events. Complexity-wise, not all the way up to a “real” LARP, but certainly up above an escape room or a murder mystery party or a ren faire or something of those ilk. Plus, you have to assume basically everyone who will every play it is doing so for the first time, no veteran players. And at a premium price.
One would think this would come with a fairly straightforward set of rules or guidelines; I imagined an email with a title along the lines of “To ensure you have the best possible experience…” And instead, they just… didn’t?
For example, the marketing made a big deal about “starring in your own story” and guests were strongly encouraged to dress up. But they really didn’t want guests to use character names. That seems mostly logistical, with guest profiles and whatnot tied to their real names. That’s the sort of obvious-in-retrospect but not-so-much ahead of time detail that is the reason Session Zero exists! This isn’t Paranoia, it’s not cheating to tell the players how to play the game, just tell them! For $6000, I’d expect to be told ahead of time “please wear costumes but please don’t use a fake name.”
But it’s the lack of any sort of GameMaster/StoryTeller that stunned me. The just-shy of 40-year DM in me kept watching those video clips going “no, no, no, someone put your thumb on the scale there.” The interaction that really got me is the part of the video where she’s trying and failing to get pulled into the First Order story, and is attempting to have a conversation with the Officer actor to make this happen, and they are just talking past each other. And this made my skin crawl, because this is perfect example of a moment where you need to be able to make the “out of game” hand sign and just tell someone what’s happening. I can’t believe there wasn’t a way to break out of kayfabe and ask for help. Again, this is basic session zero safety tools shit. This is shit my 12 year old figured out on his own with his friends. Metaphorically, and maybe literally, there should always be a giant handle you can pull that means “this isn’t working for me”.
Look, this is not an original view, but for 6 grand, you should be able to do everything wrong and still get a killer experience. You shouldn’t be begging an underpaid SoCal improv actor to let you play the game you paid for halfway though your trip.
I get that they were trying to do something new for Disney, but The Mind's Eye Theatre for Vampire came out in 1993. Running a safe and fun LARP is a solved problem.
I get wanting to make something that’s as mainstream and rookie-friendly as possible, and that you don’t want to just appeal to the sort of folks that can tell you who the seven founding clans of the Camarilla were. But something we talk about a lot in tabletop RPGs is “calling for buy-in”, and holy shit clicking CONFIRM ORDER on a screen with a juicy four digit number of dollars on it is the most extreme RPG buy-in I’ve ever heard of.
I know I keep coming back to the price, and that’s partly because for a price that premium you should get an equivalently premium experience, but more importantly: there was no-one casual at this thing. No one “impulse-bought” a trip on the Starcruiser. Everyone there was as bought-in as anyone ever has been, and they couldn’t figure out how to deliver an experience as good as any random night in the park with the other vampires in the sleepy NorCal farming town I went to college in.
It’s tempting to attribute all that to general Disney arrogance, but I don’t think so. It all feels so much stupider than that. Arrogance would be ignoring the prior art, this feels more like no-one could be bothered to find out if there was any? The most expensive piece of half-ass work I have ever seen. This all could have worked? Beyond the obvious budget cuts and trying to scale down, this could have worked. It’s wild to me that they’d spend that much money, and energy, and marketing mindshare, and then not make sure it did. I mean, really, no one employed by Imagineering used to be the Prince of Glendale or something? Unlikely. I don’t think anyone intentionally sandbagged this project, but it sure doesn’t look like anyone involved cared if it was successful.
Weird.
Bad Art is Still Art
It’s “Spicy Takes Week” over at Polygon, and one of the bits they’re kicking off with is: Roger Ebert saying video games are not art is still haunting games.
For everyone that made better choices about how to spend the early 00s than I did, almost two decades ago film critic Roger Ebert claimed that video games were not and could not be art, which was an opinion that the video game–playing denizens of the web took in good humor and weren’t weird about at all. HAHA, of course I am kidding, and instead it turned into a whole thing which still has occasional outbreaks, and the vitrol of the response was in retrospect was an early-warning sign of the forces that would congeal into gamergate and then keep going.
At the time, I thought it was terribly funny, mostly because of the irony of a critic of a new-ish artform that was only recently regarded as art kicking down the ladder behind him, but also because the movie that inspired him to share this view was the 2005 adaptation of DOOM, and look, if that movie was my only data point I’d deny that games were art too.
Whenever the videogames-as-art topic pops back up, I’m always briefly hopeful, because there are actually a lot of interesting topics here—what does it mean for authorship and art if the audience is also invited to be part of that authorship? If video games are art, are tabletop games? Can collaborative art made exclusively for the participants be art? (For the record, yes, yes, and yes.) There’s also fun potential side-order of “games may not be art but can contain art, and even better can be used to create art,” which is where the real juice is.
But no, that’s never what anyone wants to talk about, instead it’s always, as polygon says, about people wanting to sit at what they see as the big kids table without having to think through the implications, with a side-order of the most tedious “is it still art it you make money” arguments you’ve ever seen, surrounded by the toxic sheen of teenagers who don’t think they’re being taken seriously enough.
I think one of the reason’s that the “Ebert thing” specifically has stuck around long past his death is that of all the mainstream critics, he seemed the most likely to be “one of us.” He was always more sympathetic to genre stuff than most of his colleagues. He loved Star Wars! He called out Pauline Kael by name to argue that no, Raiders of the Lost Ark is great, actually. He wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, for heavensakes. It sure seems like he’s be the kind of guy that would be all “heck yeah, I love video games!” and instead he said that not only they weren’t at the adults table, but that they could never get there.
Kind of a surprise, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. And look, whatever argument that there might have existed to change Ebert’s mind, a bunch of 16-year olds telling him that Halo of all things was the greatest piece of art ever created was the exact opposite.
Mostly, I’m “yes, and-ing” polygon’s article so I finally have an excise link to this interview with George Lucas at Cannes from a few months ago, which apparently only exists on the wreckage formerly known as twitter?.
The whole interview is great, a classic sharp-and-cranky Lucas interview. It’s all worth watching, but the bit I’m quoting here starts at about 7:40. The interviewer asks him about Martin Scorsese saying that Marvel movies aren’t cinema, and Lucas manages to look even grouchier and with a sort of sigh says "Look. Cinema is the art of a moving image. So if the image moves, then it’s… cinema.” (Seriously, the look on his face, a sort of patronizing exhaustion, is great.)
And I think that really cuts to the core of these weird semantic gatekeeping debates: Cinema you don’t enjoy is still Cinema. Bad Art is Still Art.
There’s so much to enjoy here. It’s not clear from the way he asks the question if the interviewer knows how much backstory there is to that question. Does he know that George and Marty have been friends for half a century? Does he know that Marcia Lucas edited a bunch of Marty’s movies. Does he know Marty has been talking shit about Star Wars since before it was released, in exactly the same way he talks about Marvel movies? Lucas’ demeanor in this is as if that Franco “First Time?” meme came to life, an air that he’s been having this exact conversation since before the guy asking the question was born, and is resigned to continuing to do so for the rest of his life.
But it’s the same set of arguments. It’s not art because it’s fun, or made money, or has spaceships, or because I just didn’t like it very much. I have a list of qualities I associate with art, and I can’t or wont recognize their presence here.
All these arguments, with video games, or superhero movies, or Star Wars or whatever, always centers around the animus of the word “art”, and the desire to make that word into a synonym for “quality”, or more importantly “quality that I, personally, value.”
It always seems to boil down to “I have a lot of emotional investment in this word meaning this exact list of things and I find it threatening whenever someone suggests the tent should be wider,” which semantically is just “TRUKK NOT MUNKY” with extra steps.
Anyway, if people make something for other people to enjoy, it’s art. Even if it’s bad.
Handicapping Doctor Who Blu-Ray releases, Updated
Previously: Handicapping future Doctor Who Blu-Ray releases
…And they’ve announced the next release: Season 25. I’m pretty pleased with myself, since that was one of the ones I predicted for release this year. Also delightfully, this make my boy Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor the first classic series Doctor to have a complete run on blu-ray. This should be a great one, extended cuts on all four stories, new sound mixes, and they really did get the rights to that PBS documentary I was thinking about. Mark Ayres, who did the music for several Seventh Doctor stories, was the last employee of the Radiophonic Workshop when it closed down, and has been a key member of the restoration team for the home video releases has been working hard to make sure the McCoy episodes got the absolute gold-star treatment, and this looks like a fitting conclusion.
On the other hand, I get docked some points since I guessed this would be a three-release year, and it sure looks like they’re only going to do two. Looking at the pattern now, it sure looks like two a year is going to be the standard? That implies they won’t be done until 2030, which is in keeping with this show to finish a set of releases long after the format has been surpassed. I was hoping they’d be done before the kids all moved out of the house, but what can you do? This also means the Jodie Whittaker logo is now the “Classic Who” logo, and is going to stick around probably long past the end of the RTD2 run? That’s funny.
This also means that for the rest of the run, we’re now even between color and black&white seasons left to do, with five of each—1 & 3-6 for B&W, and 7,11,13,16,21 in color (plus the hypothetical but almost certain “Wilderness Years” set.)
Looking back at my predictions from January, I think my reasoning is still sound, but assuming only two a year changes things a little. I genuinely can’t believe they’d have a year with only B&W releases, so that implies a color and B&W every year from here on.
So, re-dealing them out, my revised predictions look like:
2024:
- 15—done.
- 25—and done.
2025:
- 11—this has got to be less work that 7, even if the rumors are true and they are replacing those dinosaurs.
- 6—there’s no universe where they’re going to animate “The Space Pirates”, so this is pretty much ready to go?
2026:
- 4—they’ll probably also blow off animating “The Highlanders?”
- Wilderness Years—for 30th anniversary of the TV movie.
2027
- 16—It’s the Key to Time, so that oughta sell pretty well.
- 3—I can’t believe they’d release a blu-ray without animating “The Dalek’s Masterplan”, but it’s also five and a half hours long, so who knows.
2028
- 7—it feels like you wait until the last possible second in hopes the prices go down for the compute time needed to fix the color here.
- 5—The last missing one in this season has the Cybermen, so they’re absolutely going to animate it eventually.
2029
- 21—one last Davison set.
- 1—the checks should have cleared by this point.
2030
- 13—Zygons, shutting off the lights.
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021)
I’ve been Extremely Online pretty much since that was a thing you could be. Being Online is a condition that’s not well described or represented Offline. Most books or movies about scenes I was a part of, either directly or tangentially, tend not to be very accurate, not get the vibe right. I read books about computer games, say, and tend to leave with a sense of “huh, that’s not how it was for me at all.” Online is even worse; this is probably because Online is always describing itself to itself, and there’s no room for a slow, non-networked, Offline description.
Patricia Lockwood, who apparently dodged a thousand years of jail, used to be fairly active on the outer edges of what used to be called “weird twitter.” It turns out, poets were really good at twitter’s strange limitations, go figure. She wrote a book a few years ago called No One is Talking About This, which I had been looking forward to very much, but only just now finally had a chance to sit down and read.
This book is the single best description I’ve ever read of what it’s like to be Extremely Online. Specifically, it’s simply the best description of what it was like to read twitter too much in the late twenty-teens. The timing is accidentally perfect, it’s the perfect eulogy for that phase of the internet that existed between the recession and the pandemic; the five websites full of screenshots of the other four era, before the Disaster of the Twenties really got rolling.
But more generally, it perfectly encapsulates the Online Condition. The way The Online expands and consumes all your mental and emotional bandwidth, and the way Real Life sort of falls away, unable to match the dopamine flow. The way your head is full of all this stuff that no one else around you knows, or recognizes, or cares about. The Online doesn’t become more real than The Real, exactly, just more present, and faster, and louder.
But this book isn’t about any of that. This book is about what it’s like to be Online when Real Life suddenly becomes Extremely Real. And the result isn’t that suddenly Real Life becomes real again, it’s that neither seems real, and you float in this twilight realm between the two spaces, unable to engage with or believe either of them.
The way neither space can act as an escape valve for the other, and the realities continue to diverge past the point where you can hold both in your head, and you find yourself in both places, gasping out, for different reasons, No One is Talking About This.
I’m generally a fast reader. I don’t intend to humblebrag here, despite leaving this sentence in—I’ve always read fast, I tend to gulp books down. (I also walk fast and talk fast, and should probably do something about my caffeine intake.) This is a short book, but it took me a long time to read, because I couldn’t make it very far before I had to put it down and just sort of process the last couple of pages. It was very, very funny, but it got much further under my skin than I was expecting.
I enjoyed it very much. Strongly recommended.
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2006)
This book has been on my list for ages, at least since it won the Hugo. Thanks to the dual prompting of the new show and some light peer pressure, I finally read it. Let’s get this out of the way up front: I liked it a lot. Great book! You should read it.
But my goodness, this is a book I wish I could have read in the original language. There’s a very distinctive style and rhythm to the language, especially the dialogue, that I can only describe as “artfully clunky”, lots of people shouting declarative statements past each other. I’d love to know what percentages of that are a) the author’s style b) an artifact of the translation c) that’s how Mandarain sounds. I suspect it’s 30:70 a and c, but I’d love to know.
For a 400+ page book, there are surprisingly few characters with major “speaking parts”.
My favorite was Shi Qiang, the grizzled police detective. Speaking of cultural and stylistic differences, that character is clearly supposed to be the hard-charging pragmatist, and as such, he felt the most in-line with the baseline of the way American technothriller/science fiction characters act. And so it kept making me laugh how constantly he would say or suggest something that seemed pretty straightforward to me, and then all the other characters would fall all over themselves about how rude and inhuman the detective was. I really enjoyed the cultural differences embedded in the fact that the other characters can barely comprehend how rude that guy is, and meanwhile I’m reading it thinking “the other guys in Miami Vice would make so much fun of this guy for being too polite”.
On the other hand, Wang Miao, the character we spend the most time with, has a certain blank “video game protagonist” quality. Mostly he’s there to be shocked at the detective, solve puzzles, and deliver exposition, in that order.
In a lesser book, the third character with the most time on page, Ye Wenjie, would be the antagonist, and while her actions are opposed to those of the first two characters, the book refuses to be that straightforward. She’s really the book’s main protagonist, as her actions are what cause the plot to start moving, in many ways she manages to have the most agency of anyone in the story, despite her not realizing it.
I really, really enjoyed how hard the author worked not to editorialize on the characters. There’s the group that in an American novel would absolutely be the “bad guys”, and here the author just describes them with a tone of “well, what do you think?” Maybe the best deployment f the “villain has a point” trope I have ever seen.
The overall structure of the book was a lot of fun. Roughly speaking, it was: 100 pages of warmup laps, making sure the reader knew who everyone was and where they were, 200 pages of post-cyberpunk techno-thriller modern-day science fiction, then 100 pages of absolute unchained insanity. A++.
It’s the sort of book where the author has had some fun ideas about how physics could work, and what that would mean, and would like to tell you about it. (The all time grand-champion for “let me tell you my ideas about physics” is Masamune Shirow’s Orion which is less of a graphic novel than it is an illustrated physics textbook for a cosmology worked outwards from “how can we power spaceships with spells?” It’s incredible, and I can’t believe they keep remaking Ghost in the Shell but still haven’t done Orion even once.)
There’s plot point that hinges on a common pop culture misunderstanding of “quantum entangling”, which isn’t a dealbreaker but does jump out if you read those kinds of ars technica articles. Which isn’t a dealbreaker by any means, but it does feel like a missed opportunity to have an exchange along the lines of a human saying “but the no messaging theorem!” and the aliens saying “haha, your puny earth science has much to unlearn!!” But this is mostly there to enable the real fun crazy ideas around computers, and higher dimensions, and particle physics, and ways civilizations can (or can’t) cope with their surroundings. One of the things I genuinely like about the book is that is spends ~300 pages being a real-world hard science fiction book, and then in the last 100 or so starts doing things that would make Star Trek blush, but since you’re bought in it all works, and the end can get away with a lot.
“Hard science fiction” in the classic mid-century sense of “square-jawed Science Men think through a math word problem for 8000 words” has fallen out of vogue, and this book isn’t a throwback so much as it is a revival. Rehabilitating the (sub)genre while keeping the post-seventies innovations of the broader science fiction literary community. From the discussions on the web, I notice this seems to be a lot of younger people’s first “hard” SF, and to be clear, I think that’s great. I’m kind of a reverse-hipster on this one; I have a strong “if you like that, buckle up, there’s a whole section of the library you are going to flip over” reaction. (Wait’ll these kids discover that Clarke book that’s essentially a set of full engineering plans for a space elevator in novel form.)
The key factor in making all that work is grounding the story in the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Having the story take place in the shadow of the real-world horrors, and the plot spin out as a serious of consequences of that disaster give it a sense of social realism that glues together all the VR games and nanomaterials and sophons.
Finally, it doesn’t technically end on a cliffhanger, but I adore the double-punchline the book ends on. Incredible last scene.
Doctor Who and the Empire of Death
And there we go! Thats a wrap on first season of New New Who.
Before we go any further, let’s check in with the target audience. Traditionally, and I think this is still the case, the BBC had separate departments for “Childrens’s shows” and “Adult Drama”, as you would expect. One of the reasons that Doctor Who has always been a bit of an odd duck content-wise is that it was, and is, a children’s show, but one made by the Drama department, not the Children’s department. This can spawn a lot of Tedious DiscourseTM about whether it’s “for kids” and if so what we can use that as an excuse for (see also: Star Wars), but the practical upshot is that the target audience has always been, essentially, Smart Tweens and their Parents. That 12-14 range has always been the show’s sweet spot in terms of how scary it is, the content, the kinds of complexity it has. And like all good children’s TV, it talks up to them rather than down, and as such tends to hang on to its audience as they age out of the tween sweet spot.
Well, as it happens, I have both a 12 and a 14-year old, and they absolutely loved it. My 14-year old was practically hovering the entire show as she vibrated from excitement, and as the credits rolled she declared this episode to be the “greatest Doctor Who ever!”
And you know what? That’s the review. Whatever us middle-aged former tweens thought about it, the core audience loved it. Mission accomplished.
Before we get to the finale proper, the folks in the UK got an appetizer—an amuse-bouche, if you will. BBC4 aired a surprise bonus episode of Tales of the Tardis featuring “Pyramids of Mars”. Recall that Tom Baker’s 4th Doctor was the surprisingly unrepresented Doctor when the other TotT episodes dropped back in November, now we know why.
The biggest disappointment is that Tom didn’t come back. But, he’s 90 now, and I think we’ve seen the last of his Doctor in live action. Instead we get Gatwa and Gibson in the Memory Tardis, with the Doctor telling the story of the first time he met Sutek.
“Pyramids of Mars” is, of course, a stone cold classic, one of best stories from one of the old show’s best periods with probably the best pair of leads the show ever had. For a long time, “Pyramids” was my pick for what to show someone whose never seen the show before; it may not be objectively The BestTM, but if you don’t like this one, Classic Doctor Who may not be the show for you.
There was some consternation in the usual parts when an unnamed TotT episode popped up on the schedule, because the time slot was 75 minutes, but any classic 4-parter clocks in at 96 or so. And look, I genuinely love that old show, but there isn’t a single 4-part story that couldn’t lose 20 minutes to its benefit. (Off the top of my head, I’m pretty sure I know what I’d chop out.)
The end result is a win all around. The trims were what you’d hope—the padding and explicit racism, in that order. Gatwa sets the tone from the get-go by describing the archeologists at the start as looters, his disgust palpable. (“I’m a time traveler. I point and laugh at archeologists.”) There’s some tastefully upgraded special effects, in keeping with the style of the blu-ray releases.
As aired, it’s placement was slightly puzzling; Ruby clearly knows who Sutek is, and they discuss how impossible he is to defeat, despite the fact that they’ve clearly escaped from the cliffhanger at the end of “Legend of Ruby Sunday”, implying this is all taking place during “Empire of Death?” Once EoD aired, it wasn’t explicit, but there was clearly a place where it was supposed to go, I suspect you could edit them together basically seamlessly.
As a teaser it works remarkably well: a rerun of a story from the old show, introduced and contextualized by the current cast, acting as an extended “previously on” flashback/table-setting for the finale? That’s a great idea. They should do this more often.
The show itself: it was a classic Davies season finale. As soon as the store-brand Thanos disintegration effects started, it was clear that this was going to be one of those stories where everything was undone at the end; it was going to be 30-ish minutes of moping, followed by 5 minutes of hand-waving. Or as I put it last week, some bullshit. As such, there’s no real stakes, it’s clear this is all going to un-happen as soon as the “minutes remaining” counter gets low enough. As such, it’s mostly sort of Diet Drama, empty calories and fake sweetener. Given Davies’ track record, it’s slightly disappointing, but not surprising.
That said, it wasn’t terrible. Gatwa and Gibson have enough raw charisma to make much worse TV than this work, Langford continues to prove how terribly misused she was in the 80s, and Redgrave lands the hell out of her two or three scenes, aware that she’s not playing a character in this one so much as a plot accelerant.
Davies likes to power these kinds of big stories on emotional connections and big feelings rather than police procedural–style plot logic; we’re in a space much closer to David Lynch’s dream worlds than we are to something like Columbo. This particular speed of maximalist-melodrama isn’t the my favorite speed for Doctor Who. I mean, bring death to death? Did the Doctor really use the Uno reverse card? Fine, sure. The only part I genuinely disliked was the “now I become a monster” bit, which is staggeringly unearned and also incredibly played out. This is the kind of plot structure that tends to get dismissed as “bad writing”, and it isn’t—this is very good writing making some very specific choices that I just don’t care for myself. But people like me are why they also made “Boom” and “Dot and Bubble.”
Why is Rose Noble in this? Not that it isn’t fun to have her there, and that “how’s your uncle” isn’t a fun zing, but… she just stands around and then gets dusted? Or really, most any of the guest cast? There’s a lot of actors who got paid to watch the episode from on set, and good for them, I guess?
I really, really liked the resolution to the mystery of Ruby’s parents. The basic resolution to the “mystery”, that people and things are important if we believe them to be, not because someone else declares them to be, I thought was a great basic statement of principles for the show. Apparently, on the commentary track, Davies says that her mom turning out to be just a regular person was at least partly inspired by Rise of Skywaker reconning that out of Rey’s backstory. I thought it was great— Doctor Who has always been a show where “what you do” is more important than “where you came from”, and this made that very literal in the text. Just some regular people caught up in something bigger than themselves: sounds like Doctor Who to me.
I have to admit to not having much else to say about it? It was fine. But, seeing as we’re at the end of the season, rather than picking at the threads of this one in particular, let’s pull out and see how we’re doing overall. What shape is this show in versus where it was back in May?
Let’s start with the Doctor themself. Gatwa has a really interesting take on the character, which I really like. We’ve talked about how he’s more scared than his predecessors, and that his emotions are always up at 120%, but the thing I think is the most interesting is that he plays the 15th Doctor as much more of just a regular guy. In this case, the comparison to “Pyramids of Mars” is fascinating, as it also invokes a comparison with Tom Baker’s 4th Doctor, who is many things, none of which are “regular guy.”
As one specific example: I’ve talked a lot about how scared this incarnation gets, and “Pyramids” is probably the most visibly scared Tom’s Doctor ever was. But Tom played “scared” by getting grimmer and grouchier, and without letting his opponent see it, a real “never let them see you bleed” approach. Gatwa is very visible about it. Both “Pyramids” and “Legend/Empire” have a scene where one of the humans snaps at the Doctor for their behavior, but in “Pyramids” it was Sarah reminding the Doctor that these are real people dying and don’t be so callus about it even if there’s a bigger picture, here it was Mel telling the Doctor to get his shit together and do something. A very different take on what a masculine hero looks like, and frankly, I’m enjoying the change.
A fun distinction you make make with the actors who have played the part is that a small but vocal subset of them grew up as fans of the show before they became actors—Davison, Colin Baker, Tennant, and Capaldi have all been very open about growing up as fans. And it’s not that the “fan Doctors” are better, but they do have an extra trick they can pull out of their back pocket when they need to; Davison would pretty obviously channel Troughton when he was stuck, and both Tennant and Capaldi would clearly start doing a Tom Baker impression when the script let them down. (The exception was Colin Baker, who I think correctly realized that the only way his version of the character was every going to work was if he started at 110% and kept going.) And look, “what would Tom Baker do here?” is a pretty solid backup plan for a script that isn’t firing on all cylinders.
But now we have a new category: Doctors who grew up as fans of the Revival show. Gatwa has been pretty clear about watching the Tennant years as a kid, and so I was curious to see if we were going to be able to spot any Tennant impressions. And I can’t actually say that I did, or rather, I can’t spot the different between Gatwa channeling his childhood versus the fact that Tennant’s portrayal is the new baseline for the character, replacing Troughton. It’s not an impression so much as “like David Tennant” is how the character acts now. So I suspect that it’s not that he falls back on an impression as that Gatwa really gets how that baseline works, so that leaves him a little more cognitive space to build things on top of that.
It’s a performance I really like, and kept being surprised by, and what else can you ask for with this show?
What about Ruby? The “companion” role in Doctor Who is a strange one; more than a sidekick, but not really a full co-lead. Mostly, the role exists so that the Doctor can deliver the exposition the audience needs via dialoge. This is why the show has settled on companions from the modern day, that way the companion needs the exact same set of exposition as the audience does.
(As the story goes, Clara was originally going to be the victorian version from “The Snowmen,” but then they realized that if, for example, you had an episode set on an 80s-era cold war submarine, if the character is from the modern day all you have to say is “cold war submarine!”, whereas if the character is from somewhere else you still have to tell the audience “cold war submarine!”, but then you also have to explain to the character what a submarine and a cold war is, and then explain to the audience why you’re explaining that, and when you have a fast-moving 45-minute show, that eats up a lot of time thats better spent on literally anything else. Back when you had 96 minutes to fill in the form of four 25-minute parts, that sort of thing gave you a free scene per episode to organically fill time with.)
But you also need a character that can step in and credibly take charge of the b-plot, so not someone helpless or just there to ask questions. My general belief is that the really successful companions are the ones that you can imagine starring in their own show. Even better, ones where you have a pretty good idea of what that show would be like, and then then upgraded to the better show. As some examples from the classic show, it’s really easy to imagine what a UNIT show held down by the Brigadier, or a freelance journalist show held down by Sarah Jane would look like (even before that one happened,) or a 90s teen angst show with Ace. For the new show, both Rose and Donna explicitly sketch in their respective shows before the Doctor crashes into them.
(And this is getting away from me a little, but what makes Amy fun is that she seems like she’s that kind of character, except her “home show” doesn’t make any sense. And Clara—the best modern companion—is the reverse, in that she does have her own show she makes sense in, but doesn’t get there until she leaves. But I digres.)
Ruby immediately presents as a character in the Rose/Donna mold, a quick sketch of her home show with her adoptive family and her band, and then the Doctor crashes in. Except it’s a little more generic than her predecessors, the show she actually starts in is a different show altogether, and then the bits around her, while effective, kind of float into the background behind The Mystery. However, as much as Ruby is a little generic, she held down an entire episode of “The Ruby Sunday Show”, so by that metric, she’s a big success. Like I said back in December, Ruby dones’t feel like anything so much as Davies looking at Clara and thinking “ooh, I’ll have one of those,” complete with a mystery where the resolution is that the Doctor was seeing secrets where there are none.
I’ve had a note here reading “science ‘fiction’ vs ‘fantasy’?” since the show started, assuming this season would give me an excuse to dig into that, but this is another case where the contrast with “Pyramids” is enlightening. Sure, that story had mummies that were really robots, but it also had a rocket that was able to fly because “it transposes with its projection. Pyramid power.” I can’t with a straight face say that there’s anything significantly different due to this “pivot”; in practice most of the differences here seem to be stylistic ones due to Von Däniken–esque Chariots of the Gods–style ancient aliens aren’t the hottest thing in pop culture anymore. And the Doctor spitting “cultural appropriation” was a more interesting take on the material than the old show ever managed. (or, for that matter, the entirety of Stargate.)
I’m kinda fascinated that they spent all that money on that new Tardis console room, and made a big deal out of the jukebox, and then just didn’t use either? They had to build a new one, since Whittaker’s salt lamp set didn’t exist anymore, but maybe you didn’t need to build all that if you weren’t really going to use it? The Tardis set that got the most time ended up being the Memory Tardis. That’s funny.
By any objective measure, this is the best shape the show has been in for a decade. Good reviews, solid cast, more chatter online than I’ve seen in years. It’s got a big spot on that top carousel on Disney+! It starts one of the Kens from Barbie!
There’s always a certain amount of hand-wringing from the more phlegmatic corners of the the fan base who are convinced that the show is doomed and about to be cancelled, again. Which is funny, since I’m not sure there’s any other media property that’s gotten the number of “second chances” or “new leases on life” that Doctor Who has. And inevitably, if you ask these people what the solution is, the answer is always to make the show exactly like it was when they we’re twelve, and, yeah. Between that and summoning the internet version of soccer hooligans—that is, Star Wars fans—by invoking TLJ, and the internet is in full froth this weekend. I read maybe six of the worst takes on any piece of media ever over the weekend. One guy I saw actually openly wished the show was more like Farscape, and I don’t know how to tell you this, fella, but you’re not nostalgic for that show, you’re nostalgic for being fifteen.
There’s also a lot of free-floating fan anxiety about whether it was a “good starting point”, which forms a feedback loop with the incredibly tedious is it season 1, 14, or 40 “discussion.” (It’s season one, deal with it.) People with a straight face telling newcomers that they can’t watch this season yet, they need to go watch a 20-year old show from 2005 first. There’s lots of “I enjoyed it but my wife who doesn’t really like the show and hasn’t seen the old show didn’t” and like, buddy, the show isn’t the problem there. You ever watch a show with her that she picked?
The right answer to “where do I start” is “what’s on now”. Go watch that episode Disney+ says is Season One, Episode One. “Shows with lore” is a thing that exists now, in a way it didn’t in 2005; plus, as much as this is a soft reboot, there is a reason why wikipedia refuses to call this anything other than season 14. There’s this charming but weird pathology amongst a certain set of terminally online fans that while THEY will read wikis non-stop, “regular people” need to have everything explained to them or they’re be lost and confused.
But it’s the other way around; normal people don’t watch every single episode of things, they’re used to using context clues to keep up—big evil death god dog, got it. It’s only that class of fan that needs absolutely everything explained or they go off the deep end about “canon violations” or “plot holes.” These aren’t documentaties about fake people, they’re stories. Grow some media literacy like those “regular people” you talk down about. These, of course, are the people who went absolutely berserk at the reveal of Ruby’s parents, because they can’t believe that all their paying attention to detail didn’t pay off. Like we said up at the top,Doctor Who is unique in that it’s a mostly sci-fi show where the “male, 18-25” demographic isn’t the core demographic, and that leads to some funny responses.
Anyway, the show’s back, it’s in good hands, it’s doing great, it’s really fun, and the core audience loves it. Glad you’re back, Doctor. Looking forward to Christmas.
Doctor Who and the Legend of Ruby Sunday
Here we are in 2024, and Bonnie Langford has been in what amounts to three season finales in a row. What a time to be alive.
Spoilers Ahoy
It’s hard to know quite what to say about this one. Back in his first run at the show, RTD established a very consistant pattern for the two-part finale they did every year: part one was 45 minutes of building problems that crescendo into a cliffhanger that seems unsolvable, and then a second part that started in a slightly different place and resolved whatever threat was threatening to destroy all life in the universe this week. The problem is, that of the five of those RTD did between 2005 and 2009, exactly none of them actually worked or were narratively satisfying in any way. Mostly, the first halves were good? But those first halves aren’t actually a story, they work more like a trailer for the finale than anything else. So, as much as I’ve genuinely enjoyed this season to date, I have to admit I spent most of this week thinking to myself, “yeah, looks like thats setting up some bullshit.”
This one was structurally a little strange, with the Doctor trying to solve both the mystery of the woman who keeps appearing and suddenly caring about solving where Ruby came from, not because of any hint they’re connected, but seemingly because he realized it was the finale and it was time to wrap both of those up?
The whole first act is strangely clunky, with the show recapping both mysteries, reintroducing the UNIT guest cast, plus Rose Noble, plus Mel, and going over the various red herrings, and seemingly just reviewing the chatter on the web from the last few weeks. It’s remarkable that fan discussions are predictable enough that RTD can summarize them a year before any of the episodes under discussion even aired. The thing it reminded me of the most was that episode of She-Hulk that stopped to check in on what the chuds were saying on twitter, and got it exactly right, despite being written and filmed ages before any of the show aired or any of those discussions happened. The other thing it kept making me think of was that episode of Sherlock where they review all the fan theories about how he could have survived the fall, before sheepishly revealing what they had in mind, and then waving a hand and saying, basically, but it doesn’t matter.
But things pick up once they open the time window and get Mel involved. The smeary visuals of the time window were probably the best use of that extra Disney money to date, Jemma Redgrave and Bonnie Langford were both excellent, and Gatwa and Gibson are always fun to watch. Actually, let me spend an extra sentence or two on that; both Kate’s scene with the Doctor reminiscing about who he used to be, and Mel’s scene telling him to get his act together were outstanding, both perfect examples of how this new incarnation of the show is supposed to work. RTD is incredibly good at those little emotional character beats, and thats the stuff that makes these slightly overwrought finales worth it.
It’s wild to me that they’re actually invoking Susan Foreman as a plot element rather than an easter egg for the first time, well, ever. It seems pretty obvious how that’s going to resolve next week—she’s gonna be Mrs. Flood, right? Mostly, I’m curious about where that goes now that we’ve broken the seal on it; there’s a reason why Susan got written out, and why the past 59 years the answer to “do you have family” has always been some version of “I don’t know” and a pained look.
I also have to admit I’ve really had my fill of Big Lore Reveals from the last couple of years; the last one I enjoyed was Capaldi gasping “I didn’t leave because I was bored!”; everything since then has been diminishing returns, to say the least. I’m slightly dreading the can of worms this seems likely to open.
On the other hand: wow, they really brought Sutek back! That rumor has been knocking around for a while, and I did not believe it one bit, but then 91-year old Gabriel Woolf’s voice boomed out of the speakers, and away we go. Incredible. “The Pyramids of Mars” is one of the all-time great Classic Who episodes, and Sutek stands as probably the best villain that never got a return engagement.
On a personal note, back in the days before Who came back, I once lifted Sutek wholesale for a tabletop RPG game I ran for a group that had never seen the show. I think, in 30+ years of DM-ing, that’s the only time I’ve ever lifted something from a movie or show wholesale without changing anything, because it was already perfect. I mention this to illustrate that I could not physically be closer to the center of the target audience crosshairs for bringing this particular character back.
It’s also a favorite of both my kids, and “I bring Sutek’s gift of death” is a line we quote all the time. You would not believe how hard everyone freaked out when the reveal landed.
In conclusion, a good time was had by all, and I’m bracing for next week’s impact.
Two last thoughts:
A character warning of imminent doom named “Harriet Arbinger” is absolute god tier, A+++.
A huge congrats to everyone out there who called “Sue Tech” a few weeks ago. I stand corrected.
Doctor Who and Rogue
Back during Davies’ first run on the show, the late season episode by a new writer was practically a genre into itself. It was kinda the try-out slot? But what’s that look like here in ’24, given that the seasons are so much shorter now, and that this is the first episode not written by someone who also wrote for 2007’s series three since 2020? Because this is the one written by Loki Season 1 director Kate Herron, and the immediate reaction is to wish the people behind Loki had let her do more than just direct.
Riffing on Bridgerton is the sort of thing that seems inevitable for Who to do, and lavish costume drama is the thing the BBC does best, so it looks great and everyone knows exactly what vibe to hit. British actors don’t always know how to hit “campy alien planet”, but they can all do “sinister Pride & Prejudice” in their sleep. The twist, that it’s aliens who are literally fans of Bridgerton who have gone back in time to cosplay is properly brilliant, the sort of thing you kind of can’t believe Doctor Who has never done before.
However, none of that’s what anyone wants to talk about with this one. Back in November I talked about the sense that Davies had unfinished business, a list of things he didn’t get a chance to do last time. It’s clear that very high on that list was “get the Doctor to kiss a man.”
So I don’t bury the lede here, I liked it, I thought it worked. Maybe more importantly, my kids loved it, by far their favorite episode of the season so far. Part of the remit of this season was to pull the “under 16s” in, and seems like mission accomplished. One of my kids is an absolutely huge Hamilton nut, and the fact that the Doctor was locking lips with King George? To great to even comprehend.
Personally, using the Doctor as a romantic character has always bugged me a little, mostly because they’re an ancient space entity, and it’s hard to imagine that working between a human whose a regular amount old, and an ancient alien from the dawn of time whose either thousands or billions of years old depending on how you read the end of “Hell Bent”? But this is where I argue against myself, because what’s so great and unique about the Doctor as a character is that sure they’re an ancient borderline-lovecraftian space entity, but they want to be just a regular guy when they grow up. And part of being a regular guy is occasionally smooching someone. And since that seal was broken two decades ago now, so yeah, lets go all-in on it. If you’re a billion years older than the other person, and a different species, and you can change your physical form almost at will, gender is where you’re going to draw the line? No, I don’t think so.
Speaking of unfinished business, this really felt like the original pitches for what became “Girl in the Fireplace” and the Captain Jack character from “The Empty Child” stripped back to their basics, mashed up, and handed to a different writer. Doomed time travel–centered love affair with an extremely gay Han Solo? Check and check.
Hope thats a thread that gets picked back up on.
And a couple of stray observations:
One of the many things I like about Davies, besides just being a great writer, is that he’s both a huge fan of the entire history of the show, but isn’t precious about it, and backs that up with an impish sense of humor. I’m slightly in awe of the level of trolling that went into slipping Richard E. Grant’s “Shalka Doctor” into the past Doctor montage. They even went and did a special photoshoot with a scanner to get the image! Doctor Who’s relaxed attitude towards it’s own continuity is something we’ve covered before, but that’s a whole lot of effort to go out of your way to make the show’s continuity even weirder for weirdness sake and I am here for it.
This episode got kind of a weird reaction, for reasons both obvious and not. I don’t spent a lot of time in fan spaces these days, but I dip in occasionally. Most of the sort of people who, shall we say, pronounce woke with the ‘hard r’, checked out somewhere around Christmas, and the chatter around most of this season has been pretty positive, all things considered. But this episode seemed to be the one that blew some fuses, there was a whole lot of “this is just too different!!!1” posts after this one, with increasingly less euphemistic ways to describe what, exactly, was different and why that was bad. Lots of “think of the children”.
Beyond that, this seemed to be the point where a lot of pent-up handwringing burst to the surface. Doctor Who fans can be a weirdly pessimistic lot, which is sort of justified because the show already got cancelled once? But lots of shows get cancelled, very few come back and then run for another two decades, so maybe unclench a little, guys.
This was also the point where it became clear that the ratings for this season were “good”, but not “great”, and with only the two-part finale left for the year, this seemed to be the point where everyone started armchair diagnosing “what went wrong.” For the record, nothing went wrong, it’s doing pretty well, considering the state of media here in ’24, and all the players involved seem happy. Outside the various weird internet fan corners, the show’s gotten a positive reaction. It’s one of those weird fan things where the hard-core fans are convinced that no one but them could possibly like this, despite the fact that by all appearances, the general public likes it just fine.
But okay, if this is where everyone does their bit about what’s been bugging them, let me tell you mine. As much as I enjoyed this, it really felt like there was a beat missing. This has been sort of bugging me all season in a way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but this episode sharpened it up for me—this is not a Doctor who ever really manages to size control of a situation, who never seems to get his feet under him.
This is a combination of the way Gatwa plays him, but also the way Davies is writing him as someone who largely inspires others to act rather than act himself. This is very similar to how Eccleston’s 9th Doctor worked, but that was back in 2005, and the approach really hasn’t been tried since.
Since Dungeons & Dragons gets a shoutout here, I’ll use that as the example of what I’m talking about: The Doctor has always been the exemplar of the maxed-out charisma hero. It’s not that he’s stronger or braver or even smarter than others, it’s that he can size control of a situation mostly by sheer force of personality, talk himself from being the chief suspect to running the whole murder investigation himself. The sort of character who swaggers into a room and rolls a whole series of nat 20s on persuasion checks. And as part of that there’s a move the show likes to do, where the Doctor acts like he’s thrashing around like an idiot for the first half of the show, and then somewhere around the midpoint decides he’s tricked the bad guys into telling him enough things, puts his “parent voice” on, and mixing a metaphor, grabs the wheel of whatever’s going on, and stays in the driver’s seat for the rest of the story.
And Gatwa’s Doctor, so far, just doesn’t do that. This one comes close, which is why I noticed it—the Kylie song and past Doctor montage scene, ending with the Doctor explaining who he is, looks like it’s one of those “okay, enough screwing around” turns, but then afterwards he goes right back to being back on his heels, and largely fails to resolve the story, with Ruby and Rogue making all the actually valuable decisions.
Especially combined with the theme of being scared a lot, it adds up to a fun but strangely ineffective version of the character, which I don’t think is the intent? As part of this soft reboot/revival, it’s as if they haven’t rehabbed all the old pieces yet, and havn’t quite redeployed all the tools in the toolbox. To be clear: I don’t think this is a problem, but it’s an aspect of the character that I miss, and I hope floats back in next year.
Doctor Who and Dot and Bubble
Well, okay, let’s start with that ending.
This season has been a little stingy about giving Gatwa any big show-offy grandstanding moments, scenes where he can really flex. That’s been in keeping with the gear this season has mostly operated in—the Doctor’s a fun-loving guy with big emotions who tends to inspire others to solve problems instead of solving them himself. No big showdowns, so to speak.
But boy, he really got to uncork everything he had here. When the penny drops at the end, it’s a remarkable performance as the shock moves through anger and finally lands on total disgust. The Doctor whose emotions are always at 120% finally gets something to really point that skill at, and he gets to physically embody the platonic concept of “Frustration.”
The character beat I really liked was right after, where he decides not to save those rich kids against their will. He’s absolutely got the ability to do that, and saving people who don’t want to be saved would solidly be in character—but also in character is deciding that, nope, he’s going to let these assholes go ahead and live with their chosen consequences.
As soon as Gatwa was cast, the odds seemed good that they were going to do something with the fact the Doctor has a new skin tone. It seemed obvious that RTD was too good a writer to just do an unreconstructed Very Special Episode about Racism, but presumably going to get addressed somehow. And they didn’t really talk about it, and the season to date has more or less ignored that aspect of the Doctor’s current physical form. And going into this week, there was absolutely no indication that was going to change.
Instead, we get 40 minutes of narrative sleight-of-hand, looking for all appearances that what we have this week is a 60-year old man satirizing social media. And it fully commits to this, hitting all the points you expect to see, even making the “bubble” a literal thing. The kids can’t do anything without their socials! They can’t even walk on their own! They don’t notice anything around them! There’s even a character named “Doctor Pee!” Two-thirds of the way through, you’re sort of rolling your eyes, thinking, “yeah man, I had a bad time on twitter too, maybe give the kids a break.”
Davies trusts that you’re just not going to notice that after a season full of incredibly diverse casting, that every person in the video squares has the same pale skin color. That comments like “I thought you all looked the same” will slide by without connecting to anything. The guest lead’s reaction to the Doctor in Ruby being in the same physical space is weird, but not so weird it sticks out.
At the same time, theres a vague but growing sense that none of the people on this planet are good people. It’s not just that they’re rich kids dependent on a sytem they don’t understand, and convinced of their own superiority, but there’s a more fundamental moral rot. By the time Lindy gets the man who just rescued her murdered to save her own skin, it doesn’t come across as a shock so much as “wow, they really are all assholes.”
Going into the last act, there’s a weird unease about what kind of story this even is—it doesn’t seem like we’re making fun of instagram anymore, and we also seem to have moved past a story about sheltered elite kids learning how to be better, so where is this going? And then the trap snaps shut, because we were on the Racism Planet, populated by people who would literally rather die than be rescued by a Black man.
I love how absolutely surgical it is. Instead of doing 45 minutes of “oh no, the south!” it’s 40 minutes of distraction and then an absolute gut punch. Part of what allows them to obscure the fact that this was “the racism one” is that because the Doctor wasn’t looking for it, neither was the audience, and so it sneaks up on both him and us.
Back when New New Who kicked off in November we spent some time speculating about why Davies would choose to come back and do more Doctor Who at this point in his career. Like all things, it’s clearly complicated and not just one thing; he gave an interview with a kid a few months ago where the kid asks him how he keeps coming up with new monsters, and his response is that it’s the other way around, and that he got the job because he can’t stop coming up with monsters, and I suspect that’s a lot more honest than the joking tone makes it sound. But it was also clear that he was angry and had things to say, and this is the kind of thing I was imagining.
Again like last week, I really feel like this needed a little card at the beginning that said “look, he was still mostly working on that show with Agent Scully. We didn’t leave our main guy out of 1/4 of his first season by choice!” The video squares was a tremendously clever fix, as it let him be in quite a bit of the show, despite the fact that those shots were probably all done in one afternoon with no set to speak of. This was the second one they filmed, as the second half of the first production block, which means that the Doctor’s shriek of rage was the first scene Gatwa filmed for this season. That’s a hell of a thing to land on your first day on the job.
I sketched the first draft of this out as I was coming down with COVID, and originally I ended this with “…and I’m sure everyone is going to be completely normal about this.” But it turns out they mostly were! There were the usual suspects who tried to claim it actually wasn’t racism at the end, instead something else that they described that was actually just racism except they didn’t know it, but mostly everyone was on board! It turns out the one everyone got weird about was the next one…
Doctor Who and 73 Yards
The problem was that they needed to start filming before Gatwa was done working on Sex Education. Meaning even though they only doing 8 shows a year now, they had to open the production schedule with a Doctor-Lite episode like it was still 2008. This was the first one they filmed, before even the Christmas episode, so this was actually Gibson’s first time out with the part and on her own for most of it. It’s not clear when they realized this was going to happen, but it feels like it was late in the day, as this has a certain “written at the last moment” quality to it. It sort of feels like this all needs to be in a title card at the start, because I’m not sure much about this makes sense other than as a way to paper over a production glitch.
Opening without the regular titles is a nice touch, since “Doctor Who” isn’t actually in this one, this is the Ruby show. The whole opening act is nicely spooky, in a Kirkland-brand The Wicker Man sort of way. Wales is, as always, gorgeous, and the escalating tension in the pub full of unfriendly locals is a really solid horror movie sequence, with a killer punchline. The strange woman following Ruby is unsettling without being directly scary, there’s a solid rural horror ghost story fully assembled.
And then Davies does one of his favorite tricks, which is to run though the whole premise from the trailer in the first 20 minutes, and then move on and do something totally different. I was not expecting to pivot into a story set 20 years later, so kudos for the genuine surprise.
It’s a shame, then that the actual story feels assembled out of bits of other, better Davies scripts. The main thrust is somewhere between “Turn Left” and Years and Years, the evil prime minster is Harold Saxon plus any number of other evil government figures from past Davies Whos, and even the best part of this is a rerun of Lucy, Saxon’s wife, being abused in the background, except without, you know, the part at the end where she shoots him.
That said, the standout sequence is the scene where Ruby apologizes to the other campaign worker for not helping her earlier because she only had one shot and she had to be sure, and then maneuvering the ghost or phantom or whatever it is into position. That feels like the scene the whole episode was written outwards from.
A recurring theme in Davies work are characters trapped in a world where no one will help them. It’s not quite full-blown nihilism, but Davies has a very low opinion of the average person, and this episode is chock full of unkind, unfriendly, unhelpful people. It’s a tremendously negative worldview, exacerbated by the phantom making things worse.
The phantom woman’s effect on the people who talk to her is always effective, and it’s interesting that fear continues to be a major theme this year, even when it’s not the Doctor being afraid. The hiker, the pub denizen, her mom provide a solid building horror at what that phantom might be.
The best is the brief appearance by Jemma Redgrave’s Kate Stewart who gets to swagger in, show what a UNIT show starring her would actually look like, and then gets to act the hell out of the spell descending on her and becoming terrifying. Kate Stewart has been a recurring character for 12 years now, and she’s never been better deployed than she was here and in “The Giggle” last year, mostly by remembering that Redgrave can really act. And I really liked the beat that Kate knew something was up with the timeline. Here’s hoping some of those spin-off rumors are true!
And speaking of that, one of the rumored (working? code name?) titles for a spin off is something to the effect of “the war between the land and the sea,” which is a phrase that makes an appearance—and that probably means nothing, but worth noting.
(And as a stray comment, I’d be willing to bet the costuming note for “middle-aged” Ruby was “how close can you get to Michelle Pfeifer’s Selina Kyle before she turns into Catwoman?”)
But then the last act slides into the most unearned, garbage ending. As soon as the story skips forward in time the first time it’s clear there’s going to be some kind of closing the time loop reset ending, but… what? It’s not so much that the ending doesn’t make sense, it’s that it doesn’t even try to. The story carefully lays out two rules about the phantom woman: she always stays exactly 73 yards away from Ruby, and anyone who interacts with her runs and shuns Ruby. And the dual resolutions don’t engage with either of these. The evil prime minister, who might be the evil spirit the pub locals made up (?) runs from everything, not just Ruby, and then at the finale, when Ruby gets old enough, she… goes back in time and turns into the phantom? (And if that was Ruby all along, why was she doing what she does? Why are old Ruby and the Phantom played by different actresses? Was it really Ruby in the first loop, or did she replace the original phantom?)
The obvious point of comparison here is “Blink”—a Doctor-Lite episode built around a monster with clearly-stated rules, but in that show, the resolution centered on using the monster’s own rules against them, here the resolutions center around the monster growing new features suddenly.
Since this is where it becomes explicit in the text, we should probably say something about the much-discussed pivot towards the supernatural and paranormal. Mostly, the difference beween “science-fiction”, “science-fantasy”, “the paranormal”, and “fantasy” is a matter of which latin roots you use to make up the fake words with, but here it seems to be an excuse to just not bother about how anything works or wire up the ending, which combined with the “lol, music am I right?” ending to “The Devil’s Chord” is a little worrying.
Most seasons of the revival show seem to have that one episode that isn’t necessarily “bad” or “cheap”, but it’s clear that it got less attention than the ones around it, the one where everyone went, “yeah, that’s fine,” and then went back to working on the cool landmines or something.
The thing it reminded me of the most was “Boomtown”, from the revival show’s first season back in 2005. That was a last second replacement script for one that had fallen through, it was cheap(er), set in Wales, had one good scene in the middle, and had a nonsensical ending that was basically just “a wizard did it.” It wasn’t “bad”, so much as it was clear everyone involved was busy either working on the WW2 gas mask zombies on one side or making the big finale on the other, and just needed to get this out out the door.
And look, I kinda liked “Boomtown,” copout ending non-withstanding, and I kinda liked this with the same hedge. If your weakest episode to date still manages a solid 20 minutes of Welsh horror followed by a ghost preventing an evil spirit from starting a nuclear war, your show’s probably in good shape.å
Happy (Day After) Towel Day
“Listen, it’s a tough universe! Theres all sorts of people and things trying to do you, kill you, rip you off, everything! If you’re going to survive out there, you’ve really got to know where your towel is.” —Ford Prefect
X-Men 97
I liked it! I liked it a lot.
Taken mostly on it’s own: a really fun show, well made, great look. Really captures what’s fun and bonkers about the X-Men as a concept and a team. They nailed an animation style that looks like how you remember the old show looked, as opposed to how it actually looked.
Taken from the perspective of someone who retained more facts about “X” “Men” than is recommended by the surgeon general: And it also did a great job both following up on the old cartoon as well as riffing on stuff from the comics, and allin a way that spent a lot of time winking at long time fans but stayed completely accessable to people with no prior knowledge beyond “that one is Wolverine, right?” Immediately in the S-tier of revivals/reboots/continuations, or whatever we call these things now.
Taken as a show that’s part of the broader media-social-political landscape of the Twenties: Holy smokes I cannot believe they really had the balls to spend 10 episodes finding new ways to say “Magneto was Right.”
Doctor Who and BOOM
Doctor Who has always been a very writerly show. Part of this is due to the fact that it has always used individually-hired freelancers instead of staff writers or a single author, but also because the author is the one name that’s always been in the opening credits. This is part of what leads to the show’s anthology-with-fixed-cast vibe, with very different things promised by a show that opens with “by Robert Holmes”, “by Terry Nation”, or more to the point for this week, “by Steven Moffat’.
For everyone playing the home game, Moffat was the guy best known for the “Friends-but-British” sitcom Coupling before seemingly coming out of nowhere the first season of the revival show with the two best episodes that year—“The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances“—aka, “the one with the WW2 gas mask zombies”. It’s a trick he repeated the next three years, showing up and writing the best episodes of the season (“Girl in the Fireplace”, “Blink”, “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead”), before walking away from a movie with Steven Spielberg to take over the show himself for the Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi Doctors, while also doing Sherlock at the same time. Somewhere along the line, he ended up as the person who had written the most televised Doctor Who, and then left at the same time as Capaldi. He followed his immediate predecessor’s lead in not returning to the show after he left, spending his time writing perfectly acceptable adaptations of Dracula.
When Davies announced he was coming back, Moffat was the next person everyone asked about; after spending months as the worst kept secret in TV they admitted that yes, he was writing two—episode 3 and the ’24 christmas special.
And so for episode 3 we have a double showcase—an opportunity for Gatwa to really show what he can do with the part, while a returning Steven Moffat shows why he’s still the best thats ever written the show. The central conceit—the Doctor is stuck on a landmine and can’t move for the whole runtime—ends up being a phenomenal way to keep the show focused on what the Doctor is good at: talking to people and being clever.
One of the funnier aspects of the Doctor being literally the same character being played by different actors but in the same continuity is that you can’t get away with remaking old stories with the new cast. Unlike, say, Sherlock Holmes, you can’t just do “our version of ‘Hound of the Baskervilles’”, you have to find a way to run the standards while still doing a new story.
Moffat realizes that the structure of having the character in one place trying to disarm a landmine the whole time is great frame to hang a whole bunch of very Doctory things to see what he does with them.
Gatwa takes the material and makes it sing, occasionally literally. This feels like where his take on the character locks into place. He’s still doing big emotions at full speed, he’s still scared like other incarnations are not, but he’s thoughtful and charming and clever in a way he hadn’t quite ever been yet. For lack of a better vocabulary, he’s suddenly much more “Doctory”. Because it turns out the trick to writing Gatwa is to write like he’s Peter Capaldi?
And that’s not quite fair. One of the things you start to notice is that the very short list of people who’ve written for more than one Doctor tend to have their own take on who the character is, and write for “their” Doctor, and then trust whoever is actually in the part at the moment to put their spin on it. Moffat’s writing his version of the Doctor, so on the one hand, it’s very easy to hear Capaldi or Smith saying the same lines. But it’s not as simple as “he just wrote a Capaldi episode”, he’s a good enough writer to know that it’s Gatwa who is going to be saying the lines, and leaves him plenty of space to lean in with hit take on the part.
So you get moments like the Doctor explaining away that he can work out the exact weight of the cylinder based on the way it moved when Ruby tossed it into the air but that he didn’t want to look like he was showing off, which is scene you can easily imagine any of the other post-2005 Doctor doing, but none of them would have hit the same note of barely-controlled panic Gatwa does here.
And the beat where the Doctor looks like he’s being distracted by irrelevant questions at the expense of the immediate problem—“who’d pick a fight around here?”—is a great showcase for Gatwa to show what it looks like when the Doctor has actually figured out most of the real problem way ahead of everyone else, and then lets things unfold from there.
And “Give it time, everywhere’s a beach eventually” is a 12/10 Doctor Who line.
Ruby, on the other hand, Moffat writes as a sort of midpoint between Amy and Clara, which I think makes a lot of sense considering how thinly sketched that character is, and how much Ruby’s design owes to those two predecessors. The result is the best Ruby has ever worked by a wide margin.
Music continues to be a major thematic element, as it has since for the whole of the RTD2 era, with the Doctor singing to himself to calm down, and the shared song to determine the timing of the handoff. It’s unclear if this is going to be a plot point, or if this is like romance was in 2005, and this is just a part of how the show works now? Either way, it gives the show a sense of having learned a new trick.
It’s full of Moffat easter eggs and staples: Anglican Marines! Villengard! Glitchy tech! Characters who die and then end up in a sort of strange un-death! A killer robot-type thing that apologizes before it kills you! An absolutely furious satire of capitalism, the military, algorithms, and religion! Fish Fingers and Custard!
My favorite callback, though, was this slightly spooky poem or nursery rhyme the Doctor recites to calm himself down:
”I went down to the beach and there she stood,
dark and tall, at the edge of the wood.
“The sky's too big. I'm scared,” I cried.
She replied, “Young man don't you know there's more to life,
Than the moon and the president's wife?”
I love this, because it’s an absolute perfect way to handle continuity in Doctor Who. On it’s own, its a strange little poem that vibes with the mood of him trying to calm himself down that he recites almost like a mantra. It sounds like it might be from something, one of those late 1800s poems from the part of high school english you sleep through? On it’s own, it works!
But then, for a certain kind of detail-retaining viewer, the last line does a little twist and reveals that the young man in the poem is actually the Doctor himself? (And it wasn’t the president’s wife, it was his daughter. And he didn’t steal the moon, he lost it. Or so he claimed.) Because this is a callback to some event in the Doctor’s past that both he and Missy mentioned back in series 9.
Critically, this wasn’t a nursery rhyme about hybrids, or pandoricas, or cracks in the universe, or planets where you have to tell the truth, or time-traveling religious orders with priests you forgot you talked to, or immortal lesbian vikings, or bad wolfs, or time wars, or any other actual plot elements from the last 20 years. Instead the deep cut reference is to what amounted to a throwaway call-and-response joke from the fall of 2015, which at the time sure sounded like it was something that “didn’t really happen.”
And even better, nothing anyone said back in series 9 even remotely implied there was a dark woman, or a wood, or that someone wrote a rhyme about it. This is exactly the way this show should build up these little references, callbacks with a twist, adding pieces that don’t fit in ways that imply even more we didn’t see, and in a way where you know they’ll never actually pay off, it wont ever become a big plot point. Just layers of texture, built up over the decades. It’s not “fan service” in the usual sense of the term, the recognition if the source is pure value add.
The fact that the thing being called back to was from Series 9 is also appropriate, because content and theme-wise, this story could have slotted cleanly into that year, and not just because it was a story about toxic capitalism where someone goes blind. It’s an interesting revival-with-updates of what the show was concerned about at the time.
I’ve seen a couple of comments here and there that the satire wasn’t “pointed enough”, and I don’t know guys, a story about turning decision-making over to an algorithm which then immediately turns ambulances into murder machines to keep sales up feels like exactly the right amount of pointed for 2024. The fact that it’s an “algorithm” and not a skynet-style self-aware AI feels right on the nose for our current moment.
And speaking of right on the nose: Thoughts and Prayers! It was during Moffat’s run as showrunner with Matt Smith as the Doctor that the show really broke out in the US so he’s certainly familiar with that audience; “Thoughts & Prayers” with that font sure felt like it was tacking directly towards the new American viewers on Disney+.
On the less positive side, the direction is a little dull, even considering there’s only one location. Scrubbing back through the episode to get the words to the poem right made it really clear how the whole show is 2 or 3 camera angles at 2 or 3 zoom levels. They couldn’t have convinced Rachel Talalay to stick around for one more?
On top the direction, something seemed off about the whole episode visually that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, especially the strange locked-off head-on but distant shots of the Tardis. Turns out, this was the show’s first use of a Volume-style stage, with the crater being a set and then surrounded by LED screens. And I’m just delighted that Doctor Who has enough money now to do something like that, but still doesn’t have enough money to make it look as good as Star Wars. Just perfect.
The Susan Twist character has to pay off soon now, right? The show has been very careful to make sure the Doctor never saw her, but that’s over now.
And speaking of mysterious ladies, it was a genuine shock to see Varada Sethu a year early. Since this season and the next filmed back-to-back, she got spotted at several filming locations for next season’s esisodes, leading to some wild rumors that Gibson had been fired and replaced as the companion. After that simmered for longer than it probably should have, they finally announced that, no, Gibson wasn’t leaving but Varada Sethu was joining the cast for the next season. And that seemed to be that, until here she is! Now we get to wildly speculate about if this is a case of they liked the actress and brought her back, or if this was actually a case of launching the character early. Puts a whole different spin on the “you should get married” joke.
All-in-all, tremendous episode, and really feels like the show is properly back. Moffat is my favorite writer for the show not named “Douglas Adams”, show-ran my favorite period of the show, and was the guy in charge for my all-time favorite Doctor (Capaldi, for the record.) I was sorry to see him go when he seemingly left for good. I’m glad to see him back.
Hey Boyos! The Phantom Menace at 25
Star Wars absolutely peaked just a hint after midnight, the morning of May 19, 1999.
It’s almost impossible to remember now how excited everyone was. And by “everyone” I don’t mean “nerds” or “fans” or whatever, I mean everyone. The monoculture hadn’t splintered yet, and “new Star Wars” was an event. Everyone talked about it, Natalie Portman’s kabuki-makeup face was everywhere, they ran that Darth Maul Duel of the Fates music video on MTV constantly.
The other thing that’s hard to remember is that “Star Wars” meant something totally different there in the spring of 1999. “Star Wars” was three good movies, and… some books and video games, maybe? But as far as the mainstream was concerned, it was just three movies that mostly everyone liked. For a certain kind of blockbuster filmmaking, Star Wars was still the gold standard, it was still the second highest grossing movie of all time, having only just been beat out by Titanic two years earlier. There was a tremendous amount of cultural good-will there—you don’t stay the highest grossing movie of all time by being outside of the mainstream. There were plenty of people who didn’t like it, but there were very few people who hated it. It was like the Super Bowl, or the World Series; the default cultural response was “yeah, those were pretty good!”
“Star Wars” was also a shorthand for quality. “Star Wars” movies were good movies, full stop, and “like Star Wars!” was about the highest compliment you could pay any live action action-adventure special effects anything.
And suddenly there was New Star Wars? That’s going to be amazing, by definiton!
And that trailer! We spent ages waiting for that trailer to download off the old Quicktime Trailers webpage over dialup. It was worth it.
It just genuinely didn’t occur to anyone that a new Star Wars might be bad. That just wasn’t a thing that happened.
Of course we all went to see it.
There was a big group of us that all went opening night, or rather the 12:01 am show the night before opening night. There was a bunch of us Star Wars fans, for sure, but half our group were casual at best. But it was a Thing! Everyone wanted to go.
This was before you could do this on the web, so we had to stand in line all day to get tickets. We worked out a rotation so no one had to stay there more than half an hour or so. The line outside the theature was basically a block party; everyone was in good spirits, the weather was gorgeous, someone brought a barbecue.
The little northern California town I was living in had the one Good Theatre—it was a remodeled vaudeville theature, single huge screen, lots of seats. Still had the old-style auditorium seating. The current owners had upgraded it with one of the best surround-sound systems I’ve ever heard.
The screening itself was a party. Everyone was there early, it was being “hosted” by the local radio station, and one of the DJs was MC-ing the scene, doing trivia, giving away prizes. Some people came in costume, but not a lot. This was’t a comic book convention thing, this was a bunch of regular people in a college town ready to watch a new movie that everyone knew was going to be great.
I swear this is a true story: I remember one of my friends, one of the not-so-much-a-fan ones, leaning over and asking me “what are all these nerds gonna do if the movie is bad?” She nodded her head towards the group of fans that did come in costume. Someone had a full Boba Fett outfit, which was not common in those days.
I wish I could remember what I said back. I think I made a crack along the lines of “I think they could just run that trailer a dozen times and everyone would be happy.” But it wasn’t a scenario worth thinking about. A bad Star War? No.
There had been rumblings of course. The reactions on what passed for the web in those days were… not an enthusiastic as one would have expected.
At midnight, the lights went out, and the audience roared. 12:01. Logos, then STAR WARS with that theme music. The audience made a sound I have never heard before or since, just an absolute roar of delight.
Then, that sound cut itself off very quickly, because suddenly everyone had to read a bunch of text we had never seen before.
I had another friend who was convinced that “Phantom Menace” was a fake title, and the real movie would have a “better one”. I remember side-eying him as THE PHANTOM MENACE scrolled into view in those chunky yellow letters.
The audience never got that loud again. There was a weird vibe in the room as the movie kept not… being… good. I distinctly remember the moment where the old guy with the pointy beard on Naboo says “This can only mean one thing, invasion!” which was such a cool line in the trailer, but in the context of the business meeting it actually happened in, just kind of flopped onto the ground and bled out.
“Oh shit,” I remember thinking. “That lady on AICN was right.”
My other clear memory of that night was walking out into the street afterwards. It was 2-something in the morning. It was a warm northern valley night, so it was shorts and short-sleeves weather.
The mood as we walked out into the night was strange—not sad, or angry, or even disappointed, but confused. Like leaving the stadium after your team blew what should have been an easy game. What the hell happened?
Someone I knew but hadn’t come with waved to me across the street. “That was amazing!” he yelled. We both knew he was lying, but we both let it slide. My friend that had asked what the nerds were going to do had slept through the second half.
No one would ever use “it’s like Star Wars!” as a compliment ever again.
The Phantom Menace has aged strangely, and mostly to its benefit. It’s still a bad movie, but not a terrible one. The passage of time—and the way “blockbuster” summer genre movies have evolved past it—have made it easier to see what it did well.
For starters, having the Queen of a planet arrive at the Galactice Senate to deliver eyewitness testimony about an illegal invasion only to be shut down by the senator for the invaders saying, basically, “why would we let this evidence get in the way of our desire to do nothing lets form a committee”, hits in 2024 in a way it didn’t in 1999.
And that podrace still slaps. And not just the lightsaber fight, but the whole final 4-location battle is a pretty spectacular piece of action movie-making, the occasional “let’s try spinning” non-withstanding. Lucas is at his best when he’s throwing weird images on the screen: that shot of the gungans coming out the swamp contrasted with the robots unfolding, Darth Maul pacing behind the laser fence while Darkman meditates, the fighters swirling around the command ship. The old Star War sense of humor occasionally shines through: for example, the music swells, the big door opens revealing Darth Maul and his double-bladed sword; and then Natalie Portman side-eyes Liam Neeson and deadpans “we’ll take the long way.”
I haven’t become a Prequel Apologist, exactly, but the curve I grade it on has certainly changed over the last two-and-a-half decades.
There’s a class of “big noise” movies that have become the dominant form of blockbuster action—obviously fake environments, too much CG, PG-13 without being sexy or scary, filled with beautiful-but-bored actors visibly thinking about how they’re going to spend their paychecks as they spout what’s not really dialogue but just sort of shout quips past each other. Part of what we talk about when we talk about “superhero fatigue” are these enormously expensive live-action Saturday morning toy cartoons with nothing to say.
Part of why Phantom Menace got such a nuclear negative reaction was that it was such a surprise. Before, if a huge expensive AAA movie was bad, it was because it was a colossal screwup—your David Lynch’s Dune, Dick Tracy, Waterworld, Batman & Robin. Those happened every few years or so, and would be followed by years of axe-grinding, blame-shifting, and explainers about “what went wrong.” And sure, bad sequels happened all the time—mid-tier Roger Moore Bond movies, or Jaws 3, Superman IV, Star Trek V: the low budget, low effort cash-in sequel.
Instead, here was a huge expensive AAA movie, advertised to hell and back, and by all accounts the exact movie the people making it wanted to make, and it was still bad. That just wasn’t a category in 1999. Now, it’s the dominant form. In a world where they actually honest-to-god expected me to pay full price to see Thor: The Dark World, I can’t generate the energy to be too mad about the movie with the good lightsaber fight.
To demonstrate what I mean, and without getting drawn into a epistemological debate about what I might mean by “worse”, here is a list of big-budget AAA blockbusters that have been released since 1999 that, if I had to choose, I would choose to watch Phantom Menace instead of:
- Any live action Transformers
- Any of the three Hobbit movies
- Prometheus
- Any of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels
- About half of the Fast and the Furious sequels
- That insane Lone Ranger movie with Johnny Depp as Tonto
- John Carter
- Honestly, about a third of the Marvel Movies. Well, maybe half?
- Any of the live action DC movies other than Wonder Woman
- The third Matrix
- Any of the reboot “Kelvin Universe” Star Treks
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide movie, which still makes me angrier than TPM ever did
Compared to all that, Darth Maul is high art.
On the one hand, saying a bad movie doesn’t seem so bad because other movies got worse is damning with the faintest of praise, but on the other hand, go look at that list again. Yeah, we’re grading on a curve here, and yes, Jar-Jar is terrible, but did you see Star Trek Into Darkness?
At the end of the day, The Phantom Menace was one reclusive billionaire’s deranged vision, unimpeded. Say what you will about Lucas, he basically paid for this movie out of his checking account, and it’s clear it was the exact movie he wanted to make. After decades of warmed-over lowest common denominator films by committees that have been sandblasted into nothing, one guy’s singular artistic vision starts to sound pretty good, no matter how unhinged it might have been. We need more movies where someone just gets a giant pile of money to make whatever the hell movie they want, not less. Even if they don’t always work out.
And, TPM kicked off a cycle of directors going back and revisiting their older work, which has been a mixed bag, but we got Fury Road and Twin Peaks: The Return out of it, which was more than worth it.
What does The Phantom Menace mean, two and a half decades later?
“Episode I bad” is still shorthand for “absolute trash fire of a movie”. And that night in 1999 was certainly the point where “Star Wars” stopped meaning “the only series with no bad movies” and started to mean “increasingly mid movies with breathtakingly diminished returns surrounded by the most toxic fans you can possibly imagine.”
But it has a strange staying power. There have been plenty of worse followups, sequels, and remakes, but those slide out of mind in a way that this hasn’t. No one still makes jokes about fighting Giant Spiders or “Nuking the Fridge”, but this movie has remained the Totemic example for “Terrible Followup”. To put that another way: No one liked Jar-Jar Binks, but a quarter-century later, everyone on earth still knows who that is.
Why does this movie linger in the collective consciousness like—if you’ll forgive the expression—a splinter in the mind’s eye? I think it’s because unlike most bad movies, you can squint and almost see the good movie this wanted to be. And the passing of time, and the wreckage of those other bad movies, have made it clearer what this one did right, how close it almost got. This isn’t a Blade Runner situation, there’s no clever edit that could fix this one, it’s too fundamentally misconceived in too many ways. But you can nearly feel there was a version of this movie made from almost the same parts that would have worked. You can imagine what a good movie with this cast and with these beats would look like. You can almost reach out and touch it.
And yet, the movie itself remains this terrible, beautifuly-made, stodgy thing. The sort of movie where you say to yourself, “it can’t possibly have been that bad, could it? We just didn’t like it.” And maybe you end up watching it with friends, or with your kids, or late at night on Disney+, and as it starts you think “no, this wasn’t that bad,” but sooner or later someone says “this can only mean one thing—invasion”, or Jar-Jar has a big idea, or someone asks The Junior Professional if she’s an angel, and you say “no, actually, it really was exactly that bad.”
There’s a scene towards the end of the first act that has ended up as my most-quoted line from all of Star Wars.
The heroes are escaping from Naboo on the Queen’s chromed-out starship. The Jedi are in the cockpit delivering stilted dialogue. At a loss for anything better to do, Jar-Jar wanders into the droid break room. As he enters, the R2-D2 and the other R2 units all wake up, and turn towards him, beeping.
“Hey boyos!” he exclaims.
I have five cats in my house, and whenever I walk into a room with more then one of them, they always pop their heads up and look at me.
“Hey boyos!” I exclaim.
Doctor Who and The Devil’s Chord
First: what a great title!
If “Space Babies” was about re-establishing what median-value Doctor Who is like and getting everyone back on board, “The Devil’s Chord” seems like it’s about building out from that and establishing how the show is going to work going forward. Because as soon as The Maestro climbs out of that piano, it’s clear we’re operating in a different gear—excuse me—different key than we have before. Between this and the previous, theres a real sense of “mission statement”: this is the vibe Doctor Who is going for in this iteration. Evil drag queen space gods eating the concept of Music and destroying the future? Yes, please. We’re miles away from anything else on Disney+, or anywhere else on TV.
This is also where Gatwa’s and Davies’s take on the character is starting to come into focus. Back at Christmas and then in “The Space Babies” the take on the character was basically “big and fun.” And this stays true here, the Doctor’s excitement over where Ruby wants to go is a standout, and also feels like Davies riffing on the last time he was relaunching the show, where the first place the new companion wanted to go was to watch their dad get killed in a car accident? Finally, as he says, they want to go somewhere fun.
But I’m starting to run out of ways to phrase “this is all really fun!”, so fortunately this is where they start—and I’m sorry but I can’t help myself—adding more notes to the character. Presumably we’ll all be writing “this is when they really cracked the character” pieces next week, but for the moment two observations:
The second most interesting of these is when the Doctor realizes who or what they’re dealing with, and his response is to just… run away. The scene where they’re hiding from The Maestro and the Doctor makes a sound-proof zone to cover their tracks is probably the most effective sequence in any of Gatwa’s time so far.
“Scared” isn’t usually an emotional state the Doctor operates in, for solid structural reasons if nothing else. Doctor Who is frequently a scary show, and it’s sweet spot is right out at the edge of what the younger audience is capable of handling. But one of the things that lets Doctor Who get away with operating that far out on the ice is the character of the Doctor themselves. The Doctor is effectively indestructible, nearly always wins, and almost never scared, so they provide a real emotional safety net for the younger audience—The Doctor is here, so this is all going to be okay. Obviously we’ll see where this goes, but combined with them running away from the monster in “The Space Babies” as well, this take on the character seems to be centering on “enthusiastic but scares easy,” which is a fascinating take.
The most interesting scene, though, was the bit where he mentions that he and his granddaughter are currently living on the other side of town. Gatwa takes an interesting angle on the scene, and rather than sad or wistful, he plays the Doctor as basically cheered up by the idea that she was out there, regardless of where she is now. Unlike the last time Davies was show-running, this clearly isn’t a character that’s going to stand crying out in the rain.
This is, I think, the first time Susan has been mentioned by name in the 21st century version of the show. Like the premise speed-run in the previous episode, or the re-staging of the ruined future scene from “Pyramids of Mars” in this one, this feels less like a deep-cut continuity reference than a combination of making clear what elements of the show are in play while also deliberately hanging some guns over the mantle. Add to that the name drop of The Rani last week, and the not one but two mysterious women lurking around in the background of these last couple of shows, and clearly something is up. I’m going to refuse to speculate further, sine Davies likes to drop in these crumbs but never before built up a mystery that was solvable, these are always things that can’t make sense until the context of whatever the big-ticket finale does in June. But! Fun spotting the things that will make more sense on the rewatch regardless.
Because I grew up in a very Beatles-centric house, a few notes on the boys from Liverpool themselves. Lennon didn’t start wearing that style of round glasses until much later, but I understand wanting to flag “which one is John” with his most signature feature considering how little the actors look like the real people. I was hoping the the secret chord was going to turn out to be the mysterious opening chord of A Hard Day's Night. And look, if it had been me, I’d have had Harrison be the one to solve the puzzle.
Finally, the ending dance sequence looks like it was a lot more fun to make than it was to watch, mostly because that song wasn’t nearly good enough to spend, what, three whole minutes on? I think I see what they’re trying to do, but more than anything it had the quality that they had under-run and needed to pad out the show.
But, it was big and fun, and one of the all-time great cinematic battles of Ham vs Ham since Shatner and Montalban squared off. Jinkx Monsoon clearly looked at what Neal Patrick Harris did back in December and thought, “I can beat that.”
Were these two premiere episodes the best episodes of Doctor Who ever? No. But they’re more entertaining than the show has been in years, and it’s been even longer since it’s had this clear a vision of itself. In the six stories since November, we’ve gone from a 2008 revival piece to tuning up a whole new instrument. And then next week they’re handing it to the best person that’s ever played it…
Doctor Who and the Space Babies
And we’re back!
There’s an absolute sense of glee here. This is a show that’s absolutely in love with existing, made by people who are clearly relishing every second of their day, and inhabited by characters “glad to be alive.”
Thise sense of all-encompassing joy seems to be the central animus of Ncuti Gatwa’s take on the character—his is a Doctor who is psyched about everything and is here to have the best time possible, and hopes you’ll come along.
My favorite scene, if I’m honest, is the show ostentatiously spending the new Disney-infused budget on some gorgeous throwaway dinosaurs and then an absurdly expensive-looking prosthetic to land a butterfly-effect joke. It’s a show having an absolute ball that it can do things like this now. There’s a shot of the Doctor leaning against the Tardis while a volcano erupts in the background that’s exactly the kind of shot Doctor Who has always wanted to do, but never could until now.
And then, the final punchline of that scene with Gatwa’s muttered aside about having to turn on the Butterfly Compensator is the perfect example of the Doctor Who difference. On the one hand, it’s the exact kind of winking semi-science that’s Doctor Who’s bread-and-butter, but it’s also one of the things that makes the Doctor being an unreliable narrator of his own show so great, because it could just as easily be complete bullshit he made up on the spot because the real solution was more complex than he wanted to talk about.
But this is also our old friend, Russel T. Davies, angry nihilist, so my other favorite scene was the absolutely snarling satire about abortion and child care he banks into the episode halfway though, once everyone had relaxed and wasn’t ready for it.
Davies always liked a mostly fun and frothy lightweight season opener, and this is right in line. It’s just fun, infectiously so. After it was over, as the closing credits rolled, my fourteen year-old looked up and the screen and said “this show has got to be the best job in the world.”
It both is and is not a relaunch. On the one hand, Who has been in continuous production since 2005, albeit with an increasing irregular schedule. But on the other hand, this is the first regular actual season that wasn’t a one-off special or miniseries or something since January of 2020, and the show hasn’t been a mainstream hit since 2014 or so. And there’s probably a fair number of new-ish viewers coming in via Disney+.
So Davies splits the difference, correctly I think, and mostly seems to focus on people who have some familiarity with the show but need a refresher. “Remember that Doctor Who show you watched a decade ago? it’s back!” So the show speedruns laying out the premise, but in the gear of an extended “previously on” bit instead of making sure new viewers are keeping up.
But also, every show is a tangled mass of dense auto-continuity these days. And every episode of the show is streaming on iPlayer. Wikipedia will point you and the right ones. And every single references or easter egg is going to spawn dozens of explainer articles or reddit threads or youtube videos or some other SEO-chasing content glurge. Davies seems to cheerfully shrug and recognize that everyone that doesn’t know all this by heart is going to look it up anyway, so why burn too much screen time on it when he can use that for something else.
This doesn’t feel like anything so much as the start of a new creative team on a long-running comic, so the lore recap is not only there to help people jump back on board, but gives Davies a way to lay out which bits he’s going to be using. He’s clearly taken with the idea of the Doctor as an orphan, but all the other store-brand Campbell chosen one “revelations” that surrounded that a few years ago are left unmentioned. And his description of what happened to the Time Lords doesn’t really match anything we saw on screen before. But that’s less about “being inaccurate” than, I think, establishing the vibe the show intends to go on with. “There was a genocide and I was the only survivor” sets a very specific tone here in 2024, even before you factor in the fact that those lines are being spoken by the child of Rwandan refugees. It’s a very different tone from 2005’s “there was a war and everyone lost.”
It’s worth comparing the approach here with how Davies relaunched the show the last time, back in 2005. There, the show very carefully walked the audience through what was happening, and made sure everyone got it before moving on to the next thing. Here, the show knows that shows this complex are the default rather than the exception, assumes most of the audience already knows all this but needs reminder, and for anyone else, here’s enough keywords so you can fill in the gaps on wikipedia tomorrow morning.
The TV landscape around Doctor Who is very different now than it was in 2005. In ’05, there was basically nothing doing what Who does best—science fantasy adventure stories for smart 12-year olds and their parents. The only other significant science fiction show to speak of was Battlestar Galactica, and that was in a whole different gear. Buffy had just gone off the air, Star Trek Enterprise was gasping out it’s last season. Who had a lot of room to maneuver, but not a lot of context, so it started from “basically Buffy” and then built up from there.
Here in ’24, there’s a lot of TV operating in Who’s neighborhood. Heck, even just on Disney+, the various Marvel and Star Wars shows are going after much the same audience, and the next streaming app over is full of new actually good new Star Trek.
As such, Davies doesn’t waste a lot of time on median value Who, but leans all the way in on stuff only Doctor Who would even thinking of doing. One of the major animating forces here seems to be, basically “Yeah, Loki was pretty good. You ever see Loki do this?” and then pulling back the curtain to show a room full of babies. Space babies.
What makes this show different from all the other sci-fi-eqsue shows with baroque lore? A main character who loves life, loves what he does, doesn’t carry a weapon, and thinks it’s just as important to save the monster as anyone else.
A criticism you sometimes see about this show is that it “doesn’t take things seriously enough”, or variations thereof. And this is one of those criticisms that almost gets it, but missed the point entirely. Because the show does take things seriously, just not the same things that a show like Star Trek does. To quote the show’s own lead character, the show is very serious about what it does, just not necessarily the way it does it. To put that another way, Doctor Who is a show that takes being very silly very seriously.
At 46, I loved every second of this, but if I’m honest, I know I would have absolutely hated this at 15, and (even more embarrassingly) probably would have hated it at 30. What I didn’t understand then, but understand now, is that being incredibly serious all the time isn’t a sign of strength, or maturity, or “adultness”. It turns out, it’s the exact opposite. To quote the Doctor again, there’s no point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes.
And maybe serious isn’t the right word for what I mean here. Doctor Who frequently isn’t “serious”, but it is always “sincere.” And that’s “The Space Babies”; it isn’t serious for an instant, but it’s as sincere as anything.
Plus, they spent a tremendous amount of Disney’s money to put a huge fart joke on BBC One in primetime.
Nice to see you again, Doctor.