Don’t Panic: Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at 40
Well! It turns out that this coming weekend is the 40th anniversary of Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky. I mentioned the game in passing back in July when talking about Salmon of Doubt, but I’ll take an excuse to talk about it more.
To recap: Hitchhiker started as a six-part radio show in 1978, which was a surprise hit, and was quickly followed by a second series, an album—which was a rewrite and re-record with the original cast instead of just being a straight release of the radio show—a 2-part book adaptation, a TV adaptation, and by 1984, a third book with a fourth on the way. Hitchhiker was a huge hit.
Somewhere in there, Adams discovered computers, and (so legend has it) also became a fan of Infocom’s style of literate Interactive Fiction. They were fans of his as well, and to say their respective fan-bases had a lot of overlap would be an understatement. A collaboration seemed obvious.
(For the details on how the game actually got made, I’ll point you at The Digital Antiquarian’s series of philosophical blockbusters Douglas Adams, The Computerized Hitchhiker’s, and Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style.)
These are two of my absolute favorite things—Infocom games and Hitchhiker—so this should be a “two great tastes taste great together” situation, right? Well, unfortunately, it’s a little less “peanut butter cup” and a little more “orange juice on my corn chex.”
“Book adaptation” is the sort of thing that seemed like an obvious fit for Infocom, and they did several of them, and they were all aggressively mediocre. Either the adaptation sticks too close to the book, and you end up painfully recreating the source text, usually while you “wait” and let the book keep going until you have something to do, or you lean the other way and end up with something “inspired by” rather than “based on.” Hitchhiker, amusingly, manages to do both.
By this point Adams had well established his reputation for blowing deadlines (and loving “the whooshing noise they make as they go by”) so Infocom did the sane thing and teamed him up Steve Meretzky, who had just written the spectacular—and not terribly dissimilar from Hitchhiker—Planetfall, with the understanding that Meretzky would do the programming and if Adams flagged then Meretzky could step in and push the game over the finish line.
The game would cover roughly the start of the story; starting with Arthur’s house being knocked down, continuing through the Vogon ship, arriving on the Heart of Gold, and then ending as they land on Magrathea. So, depending on your point of view, about the first two episodes of the radio and TV versions, or the first half of the first book. This was Adams’ fourth revision of this same basic set of jokes, and one senses his enthusiasm waning.
You play as Arthur (mostly, but we’ll get to that,) and the game tracks very closely to the other versions up through Arthur and Ford getting picked up by the Heart of Gold. At that point, the game starts doing its own thing, and it’s hard not to wonder if that’s where Adams got bored and let Meretzky take over.
The game—or at least the first part—wants to be terribly meta and subversive about being a text adventure game, but more often than not offers up things that are joke-shaped, but are far more irritating than funny.
The first puzzle in the game is that it is dark, and you have to open your eyes. This is a little clever, since finding and maintaining light sources are a major theme in earlier Zork-style Infocom games, and here you don’t need a battery-powered brass lantern or a glowing elvish sword, you can just open your eyes! Haha, no grues in this game, chief! Then the second puzzle is where the game really shows its colors.
Because, you see, you’ve woken up with a hangover, and you need to find and take some painkillers. Again, this is a text adventure, so you need to actually type the names of anything you want to interact with. This is long before point-and-click interfaces, or even terminal-style tab-complete. Most text games tried to keep the names of nouns you need to interact with as short as possible for ergonomic reasons, so in a normal game, the painkillers would be “pills”, or “drugs”, or “tablets”, or some other short name. Bur no, in this game, the only phrase the game recognizes for the meds is “buffered analgesic”. And look, that’s the sort of think that I’m sure sounds funny ahead of time, but is just plain irritating to actually type. (Although, credit where credit is due, four decades later, I can still type “buffered analgesic” really fast.)
And for extra gear-griding, the verb you’d use in reglar speech to consume a “buffered analgesic” would be to “take” it, except that’s the verb Infocom games use to mean “pick something up and put it in your inventory” so then you get to do a little extra puzzle where you have to guess what other verb Adams used to mean put it in your mouth and swallow.
The really famous puzzle shows up a little later: the Babel Fish. This seems to be the one that most people gave up at, and there was a stretch where Infocom was selling t-shirts that read “I got the Babel Fish!”
The setup is this: You, as Arthur, have hitchhiked on to the Vogon ship with Ford. The ship has a Babel Fish dispenser (an idea taken from the TV version, as opposed to earlier iterations where Ford was just carrying a spare.) You need to get the Babel fish into your ear so that it’ll start translating for you and you can understand what the Vogons yell at you when they show up to throw you off the ship in a little bit. So, you press the button on the machine, and a fish flies out and vanishes into a crack in the wall.
What follows is a pretty solid early-80s adventure game puzzle. You hang your bathrobe over the crack, press the button again, and then the fish hits the bathrobe, slides down, and falls into a grate on the floor. And so on, and you build out a Rube Goldberg–style solution to catch the fish. The 80s-style difficulty is that there are only a few fish in the dispenser, and when you run out you have to reload your game to before you started trying to dispense fish. This, from the era where game length was extended by making you sit and wait for your five-inch floppy drive to grind through another game load.
Everything you need to solve the puzzle is in the room, except one: the last thing you need to get the fish is the pile of junk mail from Arthur’s front porch, which you needed to have picked up on your way to lie in front of the bulldozer way back a the start of the game. No one thinks to do this the first time, or even first dozen times, and so you end up endlessly replaying the first hour of the game, trying to find what you missed.
(The Babel Fish isn’t called out by name in Why Adventure Games Suck, but one suspects it was top of Ron Gilbert’s mind when he wrote out his manifesto for Monkey Island four years later.)
The usual reaction, upon learning that the missing element was the junk mail, and coming after the thing with the eyes and the “buffered analgesic” is to mutter, screw this and stop playing.
There’s also a bit right after that where the parser starts lying to you and you have to argue with it to tell you what’s in a room, which is also the kind of joke that only sounds funny if you’re not playing the game, and probably accounted for the rest of the people throwing their hands up in the air and doing literally anything else with their time.
Which is a terrible shame, because just after that, you end up on the Heart of Gold and the game stops painfully rewriting the book or trying to be arch about being a game. Fairly quickly, Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian go hang out in the HoG’s sauna, leaving you to do your own thing. Your own thing ends up being using the backup Improbability Generator to teleport yourself around the galaxy, either as yourself or “quantum leap-style” jumping into other people. You play out sequences as all of Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian, and end up in places the main characters never end up in any of the other versions—on board the battlefleet that Arthur’s careless coment sets in motion, inside the whale, outside the lair of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. The various locations can be played in any order, and like an RPG from fifteen years later, the thing you need to beat the game has one piece in each location.
This is where the game settles in and turns into an actual adventure game instead of a retelling of the same half-dozen skits. And, more to the point, this is where the game starts doing interesting riffs on the source material instead of just recreating it.
As an example, at one point, you end up outside the cave of the Ravenenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, and the way you keep it from eating you is by carving your name on the memorial to the Beast’s victims, so that it thinks it has already eaten you. This is a solid spin on the book’s joke that the Beast is so dumb that it thinks that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you, but manges to make having read the book a bonus but not a requirement.
As in the book, to make the backup Improbability Drive work you need a source of Brownian Motion, like a cup of hot liquid. At first, you get a cup of Advanced Tea Substitute from the Nutrimat—the thing that’s almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. Later, after some puzzles and the missile attack, you can get a cup of real tea to plug into the drive, which allows it work better and makes it possible to choose your destination instead of it being random. Again, that’s three different jokes from the source material mashed together in an interesting and new way.
There’s a bit towards the end where you need to prove to Marvin that you’re intelligent, and the way you do that is by holding “tea” and “no tea” at the same time. The way you do that is by using the backup Improbably Drive to teleport into your own brain and removing your common sense particle, which is a really solid Hitchhiker joke that only appears in the game.
The game was a huge success at the time, but the general consensus seemed to be that it was very funny but very hard. You got the sense that a very small percentage of the people who played the game beat it, even grading on the curve of Infocom’s usual DNF rate. You also got the sense that there were a whole lot of people for whom HHGG was both their first and last Infocom game. Like Myst a decade later, it seemed to be the kind of game people who didn’t play games got bought for them, and didn’t convert a lot of people.
In retrospect, it’s baffling that Infocom would allow what was sure to be their best-selling game amongst new customers to be so obtuse and off-putting. It’s wild that HHGG came out the same year as Seastalker, their science fiction–themed game designed for “junior level” difficulty, and was followed by the brilliant jewel of Wishbringer, their “Introductory” game which was an absolute clinic in teaching people how to play text adventure games. Hitchhiker sold more than twice those two games combined.
(For fun, See Infocom Sales Figures, 1981-1986 | Jason Scott | Flickr)
Infocom made great art, but was not a company overly-burdened by business acumen. The company was run by people who thought of games as a way to bootstrap the company, with the intent to eventually graduate to “real” business software. The next year they “finally” released Cornerstone—their relational database product that was going to get them to the big leagues. It did not; sales were disastrous compared to the amount of money spent on development, the year after that, Infocom would sell itself to Activision; Activision would shut them down completely in 1989.
Cornerstone was a huge, self-inflicted wound, but it’s hard not to look at those sales figures, with Hitchhiker wildly outstripping everything else other than Zork I, and wonder what would have happened if Hitchhiker had left new players eager for more instead of trying to remember how to spell “analgesic.”
As Infocom recedes into the past and the memories of old people and enthusiasts, Hitchhiker maintains it’s name recognition. People who never would have heard the name “Zork” stumble across the game as the other, other, other version of Hitchhiker Adams worked on.
And so, the reality is that nowadays HHGG is likely to be most people’s first—and only—encounter with an Infocom game, and that’s too bad, because it’s really not a good example of what their games were actually like. If you’re looking for recommendation, scare up a copy of Enchanter. I’d recommend that, Wishbringer, Planetfall, and Zork II long before getting to Hitchhiker. (Zork is the famous game with the name recognition, but the second one is by far the best of the five games with “Zork” in the title.)
BBC Radio 4 did a 30th anniversary web version some years ago, which added graphics in the same style as the guide entries from the TV show, done by the same people, which feels like a re-release Infocom would have done in the late 80s if the company hadn’t been busy drowning in consequences of their bad decisions.
It’s still fun, taken on its own terms. I’d recommend the game to any fan of the other iterations of the Guide, with the caveat that it should be played with a cup of tea in one hand and a walkthrough within easy reach of the other.
All that said, it’s easy to sit here in the future and be too hard on it. The Secret of Monkey Island was a conceptual thermocline for adventure games as a genre, it’s so well designed, and it’s design philosophy is so well expressed in that design, that once you’ve played it it’s incredibly obvious what every game before it did wrong.
As a kid, though, this game fascinated me. It was baffling, and seemingly impossible, but I kept plowing at it. I loved Hitchhiker, still do, and there I was, playing Arthur Dent, looking things up in my copy of the Guide and figuring out how to make the Improbability Drive work. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t amazing, it was amazingly amazing. At one point I printed out all the Guide entries from the game and made a physical Guide out of cardboard?
As an adult, what irritates me is that the game’s “questionable” design means that it’s impossible to share that magic from when I was 10. There are plenty of other things I loved at that time I can show people now, and the magic still works—Star Wars, Earthsea, Monkey Island, the other iterations of Hitchhiker, other Infocom games. This game, though, is lost. It was too much of its exact time, and while you can still play it, it’s impossible to recreate what it was like to realize you can pick up the junk mail. Not all magic lasts. Normally, this is where I’d type something like “and that’s okay”, but in this particular case, I wish they’d tried to make it last a little harder.
As a postscript, Meretzky was something of a packrat, and it turns out he saved everything. He donated his “Infocom Cabinet” to the Internet Archive, and it’s an absolute treasure trove of behind-the-scenes information, memos, designs, artwork. The Hitchhiker material is here: Infocom Cabinet: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy : Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams
Strange New Worlds Season 3 Preview
I haven’t had much of a chance to talk about Strange New Worlds here on the ‘cano, since the last season went off the air just before I got this place firing on all thrusters.
I absolutely love it, it really might have ended up as my favorite live action Trek. Between SNW and Lower Decks, it’s hard to believe maybe the two best Trek shows of all time are airing at the same time.
Over the weekend, Paramount posted a preview of the next season, which is presumably the opening of the first episode, directly following on from last year’s cliffhanger. Here, watch this, and I’ll meet you below the embed with some assorted thoughts:
- Hey, that’s the music from “Balance of Terror!”
- I know this makes me sound old, but I can’t believe that’s how good “TV Star Trek” looks now.
- Closely related: I really love this iteration of the Enterprise design. I can’t believe how good the old girl looks in this show. Inside too!
- I saw someone griping about Pike being disoriented at the start of this, but I though that was a pretty clever piece of filmmaking to have Pike need a beat to get his bearings in order to give the audience a little space to get their bearings as they get dropped into the middle of a cliffhanger from a year and a half ago.
- Star Trek has always been a show about people working together to solve problems, but I’m always impressed at how good a job SNW does at genuinely letting every member of the cast contribute to a solution under pressure, and do it in a way that the audience can follow along with.
- It’s been fun watching the LED screen tech from The Volume expanding out from The Mandalorian and into the industry at large. Case in point: the Enterprise Main Screen really is a screen now. There’s a camera move about halfway through that clip where the camera tracks sideways towards Uhura’s station (while the Balance of Terror music is going) and the parallax and focus on the screen stays correct, because it’s really a screen. Every cinematographer that’s ever worked on Trek over the last 50 years would have killed for that shot, and they can just do it now. Go look at that again—can you imagine what Nick Myer would have done to have been able to to that in Wrath of Khan? Or Robert Wise?
- I’m a simple man, with simple tastes, and someone on the bridge going on the shipwide intercom with a warning always works for me.
- And big fan of the pulsing movie-era “alert condition red” logo.
- This also gives me an opportunity to introduce my invention of The Mitchell Index. It goes like this: the quality of a given episode of SNW is directly proportional to a) if Jenna Mitchell is in the show and b) how many lines she has. So far, it’s been remarkably accurate, and this clip is close to to highest score yet recorded. She even gets the big idea!
- Speaking of Mitchell, love the way she tags the Gorn with a real torpedo too; sure, you gotta make the dud look good, but also: their shields are down and screw those guys.
- Heh, “Let’s hit it.” Hell yeah.
- Man, I love this show.
Ten Years of the Twelfth Doctor
I missed it with everything else going on at the time, but this past August marks ten years since the debut of Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor Who, who is, without a doubt, my all-time favorite version of the character.
His take on the character boiled down to, basically, “Slightly Grumpy Aging Punk Space Dad”, and it turns out that’s exactly what I always wanted. Funny, weird, a little spooky, “kind” without necessarily being “nice”. If nothing else, the Doctor should be the coolest weird uncle possible, and, well, look at that picture! Perfection.
(This is a strange thing for someone who grew up on PBS reruns of Tom Baker to admit. But when I’m watching something else and wishing the Doctor would show up and kick things into gear, it’s now Capaldi I picture instead of Baker.)
Unlike some of the other versions of the character, Twelve took a little while to dial in. So it’s sort of appropriate I didn’t remember this anniversary until now, because this past weekend was the 10th anniversary of the eighth episode of his inaugural series, “Mummy on the Orient Express.” “Mummy” wasn’t the best episode of that season—that was easily “Listen” or “Dark Water”, but “Mummy” was the episode where I finally got what they were doing.
This is slightly embarrassing, because “Mummy” is also the most blatantly throwback episode of the year; it’s a story that could have been done with very few tweaks in 1975 with Tom Baker. The key though, are those differences in approach, and one of the reasons a long running show like Doctor Who goes back and revisits old standards is to draw a contrast between how they were done then vs now.
Capaldi, unlike nearly all of his predecessors, was a genuinely well-known actor before climbing on board the Tardis. The first place I saw him was as the kid that falls in love with the (maybe?) mermaid in the criminally under-seen Local Hero. But his signature part was Malcom Tucker in The Thick of It. The Thick of It is set “behind the scenes” of the British government, and is cut from the British comedy model of “everyone is an idiot trying to muddle through”. The Thick of It takes that model one step further, though, and posits that if that’s true, there must be a tiny group of non-idiots desperately keeping the world together. That’s Malcom Tucker, nominally the government’s Director of Communications, but in reality the Prime Minister’s enforcer, spin doctor, and general Fixer. Tucker is clearly brilliant, the lone competent man surrounded by morons, but also a monster, and borderline insane. Capaldi plays him as openly menacing, but less straightforwardly malevolent as just beyond caring about anyone, constantly picking up the pieces from the problems that the various other idiots in Government have caused. Capaldi manages to play Tucker as clearly always thinking, but it’s never clear what he’s actually thinking about.
Somehow, Tucker manages to be both the series main antagonist and protagonist at the same time. And the character also had his own swearing consultant? It’s an incredible performance of a great part in a great show. (On the off chance you never saw it, he’s where “Omni-Shambles” came from, and you should stop reading this right now and go watch that show, I’ll wait for you down at the next paragraph.)
So the real problem for Doctor Who was that “Malcom Tucker as The Doctor” was simultaneously a terrible idea but one that was clearly irresistible to everyone, including show-runner Steven Moffat and Capaldi himself.
The result was that Capaldi had a strangely hesitant first season. His two immediate predecessors, David Tennant and Matt Smith, lept out of the gate with their takes on the Doctor nearly fully formed, whereas it took a bit longer to dial in Capaldi. They knew they wanted someone a little less goofy than Smith and maybe a little more standoffish and less emotional, but going “Full Tucker” clearly had strong gravity. (We’ve been working our way on-and-off through 21st century Who with the kids, and having just rewatched Capaldi’s first season, in retrospect I think he cracked what he was going to to do pretty early, but everyone else needed to get Malcom Tucker out of their systems.)
Capaldi is also an excellent actor—probably the best to ever play the part—and also one who is very willing to not be the center of attention every scene, so he hands a lot of the spotlight off to his co-lead Louise Coleman’s Clara Oswald, which makes the show a lot better, but left him strangely blurry early on.
As such, I enjoyed it, but spent a lot of that first season asking “where are they going with this?” I was enjoying it, but it wasn’t clear what the take was. Was he… just kind of a jerk now? One of the running plot lines of the season was the Doctor wondering if he was a good man or not, which was a kind of weird question to be asking in the 51st year of the show. There was another sideplot where he didn’t get along with Clara’s new boyfriend which was also unclear what the point was. Finally, the previous episode ended with Clara and the Doctor having a giant argument that would normally be the kind of thing you’d do as a cast-member was leaving, but Coleman was staying for at least there rest of the year? Where was all this going?
For me, “Mummy” is where it all clicked: Capaldi’s take on the part, what the show was doing with Clara, the fact that their relationship was as toxic as it looked and that was the point.
There are so many great little moments in “Mummy”; from the basic premise of “there’s a mummy on the orient express… in space!”, to the “20s art deco in the future” design work to, the choice of song that the band is singing, to the Doctor pulling out a cigarette case and revealing that it’s full of jelly babies.
It was also the first episode of the year that had a straightforward antagonist, that the Doctor beat by being a little bit smarter and a little bit braver than everyone else. He’d been weirdly passive up to this point; or rather, the season had a string of stories where there wasn’t an actual “bad buy” to be defeated, and had more complex, ambiguous resolutions.
It’s the denouement where it really all landed for me. Once all the noise was over, the Doctor and Clara have a quite moment on an alien beach where he explains—or rather she realizes—what his plan had been all along and why he had been acting the way he had.
The previous episode had ended with the two of them having a tremendous fight, fundamentally a misunderstanding about responsibility. The Doctor had left Clara in charge of a decision that normally he’d have taken; Clara was angry that he’d left her in the lurch, he thought she deserved the right to make the decision.
The Doctor isn’t interested in responsibility—far from it, he’s one of the most responsibility-averse characters in all of fiction—but he’s old, and he’s wise, and he’s kind, and he’s not willing not to not help if he can. And so he’ll grudgingly take responsibility for a situation if that’s what it takes—but this version is old enough, and tired enough, that he’s not going to pretend to be nice while he does it.
He ends by muttering, as much to himself as to Clara, “Sometimes all you have are bad choices. But you still have to choose.”
And that’s this incarnation in a nutshell—of course he’d really rather be off having a good time, but he’s going to do his best to help where he can, and he isn’t going to stop trying to help just because all the options are bad ones. He’d really rather the Problem Trolly be going somewhere nice, but if someone has to choose which track to go down, he’ll make the choice.
“Mummy” is the middle of a triptych of episodes where Clara’s world view fundamentally changed. In the first, she was angry that the Doctor expected her to take responsibility for the people they came across, here in the second she realized why the Doctor did what he did, and then in the next she got to step in the Doctor’s shoes again, but this time understood.
The role of the “companion” has changed significantly over the years. Towards the end of the old show they realized that if the title character is an unchanging mostly-immortal, you can wrap an ongoing story around the sidekick. The new show landed on a model where the Doctor is mostly a fixed point, but each season tells a story about the companion changing, sometimes to the point where they don’t come back the next year.
Louise Coleman was on the show for two and a half seasons, and so the show did three distinct stories about Clara. The first two stories—“who is the impossible girl” and “will she leave the show to marry the boring math teacher”—turned out to be headfakes, red herrings, and actually the show was telling another story, hidden in plain sight.
The one story you can never tell in Doctor Who is why that particular Time Lord left home, stole a time capsule, and became “The Doctor”. You can edge up against it, nibble around the edges, imply the hell out of things, but you can’t ever actually tell that story. Except, what you can do is tell the story of how someone else did the same thing, what kind of person they had to be ahead of time, what kinds of things had to happen to them, what did they need to learn.
With “Mummy”, Clara’s fate was sealed—there was no going back to “real life”, or “getting married and settling down”, or even “just leaving”. The only options left were Apotheosis or Death—or, as it turns out, both, but in the other order. She had learned too much, and was on a collision course with her own stolen Tardis.
And standing there next to her was the aging punk space dad, passing though, trying to help. My Doctor.
Both Moffat’s time as show-runner and Capaldi’s time as the Doctor have been going through a much-deserved reappraisal lately. At the time, Capaldi got a weirdly rough reaction from online corners of the fanbase. Partly this was because of the aforementioned slow start, and partly because he broke the 21st century Who streak of casting handsome young men. But mostly this was because of a brew of toxic “fans”, bad-faith actors, and various “alt-right” grifters. (You know, Tumblr.) Because of course, this last August was also the 10th anniversary of “GamerGate”. How we ended up in a place that the unchained Id of the worst people alive crashed through video game and science fiction fandoms, tried to fix the Hugos, freaked out about The Last Jedi so hard it broke Hollywood, and then elected a racist game show host to be president is a topic for another time, but those people have mostly moved the grift on from science fiction—I mean, other than the Star Wars fanbase, which became a permanent host body.
The further we get from it, the more obvious what a grift it was. It’s hard to describe how how utterly deranged the Online DiscourseTM was. There was an entire cottage industry telling people not to watch Doctor Who because of the dumbest reasons imaginable in the late twenty-teens, and those folks are just… gone now, and their absense makes it even more obvious how spurious the “concerns” were. Because this was also the peak “taking bad-faith actors seriously” era. The general “fan” “consensus” was that Capaldi was a great actor let down by bad writing, in that sense of “bad” meaning “it wasn’t sexist enough for me.”
There’s a remarkable number of posts out there what’s left of the social web of people saying, essentially, “I never watched this because $YOUTUBER said it was bad, but this is amazing!” or “we never knew what we had until it was gone!”
Well, some of us knew.
I missed this back in November, but the official Doctor Who magazine did one of their rank every episode polls on the advent of the 60th anniversary. They do this every decade or so, and they’re always interesting, inasmuch as they’re a snapshot of the general fan consensus of the time. They’re not always a great view on how the general public sees this, I mean, a poll conducted by the official magazine is strongly self-selecting for Fans with a capital F.
I didn’t see it get officially posted anywhere, but most of the nerd news websites did a piece on it, for example: Doctor Who Fans Have Crowned the Best Episode – Do You Agree? | Den of Geek. The takeway is that the top two are Capaldis, and half of the top ten are Moffat’s. That would have been an unbelievable result a decade ago, because the grifters would have swamped the voting.
Then there’s this, which I’ve been meaning to link to for a while now. Over in the burned-out nazi bar where twitter used to be, a fan of Matt Smith’s via House of the Dragon found out that he used to be the lead of another science fiction show and started live tweeting her watch through Doctor Who: jeje (@daemonsmatt). She’s up through Capaldi’s second season now, as I type this, and it’s great. She loves it, and the whole thread of threads is just a river of positivity. And even in the “oops all nazis” version of twitter, no one is showing up in the comments with the same grifter crap we had to deal with originally, those people are just gone, moved on to new marks. It’s the best. It’s fun to see what we could have had at the time if we’d run those people off faster.
This all feels hopeful in a way that’s bigger than just people discovering my favorite version of my favorite show. Maybe, the fever is finally starting to break.
Dungeons & Dragons (2024): Trying to Make a Big Tent Bigger
Dungeons & Dragons is a weird game. I don’t mean that as some kind of poetic statement about role-playing games in general, I mean that specifically within the world of tabletop RPGs, D&D is weird. It’s weird for a lot of reasons, including, but not limited to:
- It’s the only TTRPG with with actual “real world” name recognition or any sort of cross-over brand awareness.
- For most of its existence, it hasn’t been a very good game.
And then for bonus points, it’s not even one game! Depending on how you count it’s at least six different related but totally incompatible games.
The usual example for a brand name getting turned into a generic noun is “kleenex”, but the thing where “Dungeons and Dragons” has become a generic noun for all RPGs is so strange.
It’s so much more well known that everything else it’s like if all TV shows were called MASH, as in “hey, that new MASH with the dragons is pretty good, ” or “I stayed in and rewatched that MASH with the time-traveller with the police box,” etc.
There was a joke in the mid-90s that all computer games got pitched as “it’s like DOOM, but…” and then just pitched the game regardless of how much it was actually like Doom; “It’s like DOOM except it’s not in first person, it’s not in real time, you don’t have a gun, you’re a pirate, you’re not in space, and instead you solve puzzles”. D&D is like that but for real.
Which is a testament to the power of a great name and the first mover advantage, because mechanically, the first 30-or-so years of the game were a total mess. In a lot of ways, RPGs became an industry because everyone who spent more than about 90 seconds with D&D in the 70s, 80, or 90s immediately thought of ten ways to improve the game, and were right about at least eight of them. (One of the best running bits in Shannon Applecline’s seminial Designers & Dungeons is how many successful RPG companies literally started like this.)
And this mechanical weirdness isn’t just because it was first, but because of things like Gary Gygax’s desire to turn it into a competitive sport played at conventions, but also make sure that Dave Arneson didn’t get paid any royalties, and also show off how many different names of polearms he knew. As much as RPGs are sold as “do anything, the only limit is your imagination!” D&D has always been defined by it’s weird and seemingly arbitrary limits. So there’s a certain semi-effable “D&D-ness” you need for a game to be “Dungeons & Dragons” and not just another heroic fantasy game, not all of which make for a great system. It’s a game where its flaws have become part of the charm; the magic system is objectively terrible, but is also a fundamental part of it’s D&D-ness.
The upshot of all that is that for most of its life, D&D had a very clear job within the broader TTRPG world: it was the game that onboarded new players to the hobby, who then immediately graduated to other, better games. The old Red Box was one of the great New Customer Acquisition products of all time, but most people proceeded to bounce right off Advanced D&D, and then moved on to Ninja Turtles, or Traveller, or Vampire, or GURPS, or Shadowrun, or Paranoia, or Star Wars, or any number of other systems that were both better games and were more tailored to a specific vibe or genre, but all assumed you already knew how to play. It wasn’t a game you stuck with. You hear stories about people who have been playing the same AD&D 2nd Edition game for years, and then you ask a couple of follow-up questions and realize that their home rules make the Ship of Theseus look under-remodeled.
Now, for the hobby at large that’s fairly healthy, but if your salary depends on people buying “Dungeons & Dragons” books specifically, I can see how that would be fairly maddening. The game, and the people who make it, have been in an ongoing negotiation with the player base to find a flavor of the game that people are actually willing to stick around for. This results in the game’s deeply weird approach to “Editons”, where each numbered edition is effectively a whole new game, always sold with a fairly explicit “Look! We finally fixed it!”
This has obviously been something of a mixed bag. I think a big part of the reason the d20 boom happened at the turn of the century was that for the first time, 3rd edition D&D was actually a good game. Not perfect, but finally worth playing. 4e, meanwhile, was the best-designed game that no one wanted to play, and it blew up the hobby so much that it created both Pathfinder and served as one of the sparks to light off the twenty-teens narrative RPG boom.
Another result of this ongoing negotiation is that D&D also has a long tradition of “stealth” updates, where new books come out that aren’t a formal revision, but if you pull the content in it dramatically changes the game. AD&D 1 had Oriental Adventures and Unearthed Arcana, AD&D 2 had those Player’s Option books (non-weapon proficiencies!), Basic had at least three versions (the original B/X, the BECMI sets, and then the Rules Cyclopedia). 3rd had the rare Formal Update in the form of the 3.5 release, but it also had things like the Miniatures Handbook (which, if you combine that with the SAGA Edition of Star Wars, makes the path from 3 to 4 more obvious.) 4e had Essentials.
2024 is a radically different time for tabletop games than 2014 was. As the twenty-teens dawned, there was growing sense that maybe there just wasn’t going to be a commercial TTRPG industry anymore. Sales were down, the remaining publishers were pivoting to PDF-only releases, companies were either folding or moving towards other fields. TTRPGs were just going to be a hobbyist niche thing from here on out, and maybe that was going to be okay. I mean, text-based Interactive Fiction Adventure games hadn’t been commercially viable since the late 80s, but the Spring Thing was always full of new submissions. I remember an article on EN World or some such in 2012 or 2013 that described the previous year’s sales as “an extinction level event for the industry.”
Designers & Dungeons perfectly preserves the mood from the time. I have the expanded 2014 4-volume edition, although the vast majority of the content is still from the 2011 original, which officially covers the industry up to 2009 and then peeks around the corner just a bit. The sense of “history being over” pervades the entire work, theres a real sense that the heyday is over, and so now is the time to get the first draft of history right.
As such, the Dungeons & Dragons (2014) books had a certain “last party of summer vacation” quality to them. The time where D&D would have multiple teams with cool codenames working on different parts of the game was long past, this was done by a small group in a short amount of time, and somewhat infamously wasn’t really finished, which is why so many parts of the book seem to run out of steam and end with a shrug emoji and “let the DM sort it out.” The bones are pretty good, but huge chunks of it read like one of those book reports where you’re trying to hide the fact you only read the first and last chapters.
That’s attracted a lot of criticism over the years, but in their (mild) defense, I don’t think it occurred to them that anyone new was going to be playing Fifth. “We’re gonna go out on a high note, then turn the lights out after us.” Most of the non-core book product line was outsourced for the first year or so, it was all just sorta spinning down.
Obviously, that’s not how things went. Everyone has their own theory about why 5th Edition caught fire the way no previous edition had, and here’s mine: The game went back to a non-miniatures, low-math design right as the key enabling technology for onboarding new players arrived: Live Play Podcasts. By hook or by crook, the ruleset for 5E is almost perfect for an audio-only medium, and moves fast, in a way that none of the previous 21st century variants had been.
And so we find outselves in a future where D&D, as a brand, is one of Hasbro’s biggest moneymakers.
Part of what drove that success is that Hasbro has been very conservative about changes to the game, which has clearly let the game flourish like never before, but the same issues are still there. Occasionally one of the original team would pop up on twitter and say something like “yeah, it’s obvious now what we should have done instead of bonus actions,” but nothing ever shipped as a product.
5th edition has already had its stealth update in the form the Tasha/Xanathar/Mordenkainen triptych, but now we’ve got something that D&D really hasn’t had before: the 2024 books are essentially 5th Edition, 2nd Edition. Leading the charge of a strangely spaced-out release schedule is the new Player’s Handbook (2024).
Let’s start with the best part: The first thirty pages are a wonder. It opens with the best “what is an RPG” intro I have ever read, and works its way up though the basics, and by page 28 has fully explained the entire ruleset. To be clear: there aren’t later chapters with names like “Using Skills” or “Combat”, or “Advanced Rules”, this is it.
The “examples of play” are a real thing of art. The page is split into two columns: the left side of the page is a running script-like dialogue of play, and the right side is a series of annotations and explanations describing exactly what rule was in play, why they rolled what they rolled, what the outcome was. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
This is followed by an incredibly clear set of instructions on how to create a character, and then… the rest of the book is reference material. Chapters on the classes, character origins, feats, equipment, spells, a map of the Planes, stat blocks for creatures to use as familiars or morph targets.
Finally, the book ends with its other best idea: the Rules Glossary. It’s 18 pages of The Rules, alphabetical by Formal Name, clearly written. Theres no flipping around in the book looking for how to Grapple or something, it’s in the glossary. Generally, the book will refer the reader to the glossary instead of stating a rule in place.
It’s really easy to imagine how to repackage this layout into a couple of Red Box–style booklets covering the first few levels. You can basically pop the first 30 pages out as-is and slap a cover on it that says “Read This First!”
Back when I wrote about Tales of the Valiant, I made a crack that maybe there just wasn’t a best order for this material. I stand corrected. It’s outstanding.
Design-wise the book is very similar to it’s predecessor: same fonts, same pseudo-parchment look to the paper, same basic page layout. My favorite change is that the fonts are all larger, which my rapidly aging eyes appreciates.
It’s about 70 pages longer than the 2014 book, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that both books have the same number of words and that the extra space is taken up with the larger text and more art. The book is gorgeous, and is absolutely chock full of illustrations. Each class gets a full-page piece, and then each subclass gets a half-page piece showing an example of that build. It’s probably the first version of this game where you can flip through the classes chapter, and then stop at a cool picture and go “hang on, I want to play one of THOSE”. The art style feels fresh and modern in a way that’s guaranteed to make everyone say “that is so twenties” years from now; the same way that the art for the original 3rd edition books looked all clean and modern at the time, but now screams “late 90s” in a way I don’t have the critical vocabulary to describe. (Remember how everything cool had to be asymmetrical for a while there? Good times!)
Some of the early art previewed included a piece with the cast from 80s D&D cartoon drawn in the modern style of the book. At the time, I thought that was a weird piece of nostalgia bait: really? Now’s the time to do a callback to a 40-year old cartoon? Whose the audience for that?
But I was wrong about the intent, because this book is absolutely full of all manner of callbacks and cameos. The DragonLance twins are in the first couple of pages, everyone’s favorite Drow shows up not long after, there’s a guy from Baldur’s Gate 3, the examples of play are set in Castle Ravenloft, there’s Eberron airships, characters from the 80s action figure line, the idol from the old DMG cover, a cityscape of Sigil with the Lady floating down the street. It’s not a nostalgia play so much as it is a “big tent” play: the message, over and over again, is that everything fits. You remember some weird piece of D&D stuff from ages ago? Yeah, that’s in here too. Previous versions of this game have tended to start with a posture of “here’s the default way to play now”, with other “weirder” stuff floating in later. This takes the exact opposite approach, this is full-throated “yes, and” to everything D&D. So not only does Spelljammer get a shoutout in the 2 page appendix about the planes, but rules for guns are in the main equipment chapter, the psionic subclasses are in the main book, airships are in the travel costs table. Heck, the para-elemental planes are in the inner planes diagram, and I thought I was the only person who remembered those existed.
And this doesn’t just mean obscure lore pulls, the art is a case study in how to do “actual diversity”. There’s an explosion of body types, genders, skin tones, styles, and everyone looks cool.
Theres a constant, pervasive sense of trying to make the tent as big and as welcoming as possible. Turns out “One D&D” was the right codename for this; it wasn’t a version number, it was a goal.
Beyond just the art, 2024 book has a different vibe. There’s a whimsicalness from the 2014 version that’s gone: the humorous disclaimer on the title page isn’t there, there isn’t a joke entry for THAC0 in the index. If the 2014 book was an end-of-summer party, this is a start of the year syllabus.
The whole thing has been adjusted to be easier to use. The 2014 book had a very distinct yellowed-parchment pattern behind the text, the 2024 book has a similar pattern, but it’s much less busy and paler, so the text stands out better against the background. All the text is shorter, more to the point. The 2014 book had a lot of fluff that just kinda clogged up the rules when you were trying to look something up in a hurry, the 2024 book has been through an intense editing pass.
As an example: in the section for each class, each class ability has a subheading with the name of the power, and then a description, like this:
Invert the Polarity Starting at 7th level, your growing knowledge of power systems allows you to invert the polarity of control circuits, such as in teleport control panels or force fields. As a bonus action, you can add a d4 to attempts to control electrical systems. After using this power, you must take a short or long rest before using it again.
Now, it’s like this:
Level 7: Invert the Polarity Add 1d4 to checks made with the Sonic Screwdriver Tool. You regain this feature after a short or long rest.
For better or worse, it’s still 5th edition D&D. All the mechanical warts of the system are still there; the weird economy around Bonus Actions, too many classes have weird pools of bonus dice, the strange way that some classes get a whole set of “spell-like” powers to choose from, and other classes “just get spells.” There still isn’t a caster that just uses spell points. Warlocks still look like they were designed on the bus on the way to school the morning the homework was due. Inspiration is still an anemic version of better ideas from other systems. Bounded accuracy still feels weird if you’re not used to it. It’s still allergic to putting math in the text. It still tries to sweep more complex mechanics under the rug by having a very simple general rule, and then a whole host of seemingly one-off exceptions that feel like could have just been one equation or table. The text is still full of tangled sentences about powers recharging after short and long rests instead of just saying powers can used used so many times per day or encounter. There’s still no mechanic for “partial success” or “success with consequences.” You still can’t build any character from The Princess Bride. If 5th wasn’t your jam, there’s nothing here that’ll change your mind.
On the other hand, the good stuff is largely left unchanged: The Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic is still brilliant. The universal proficiency bonus is still a great approach. Bounded Accuracy enables the game to stay fun long past the point where other editions crash into a ditch filled with endless +2 modifiers. It’s the same goofball combat-focused fantasy-themed superhero game it’s been for a long time. I’ve said many times, 5e felt like the first version of D&D that wasn’t actively fighting against the way I like to run games, and the 2024 version stays that way.
All that said, it feels finished in a way the 2014 book didn’t. It’s a significantly smaller mechanical change that 3 to 3.5 was, but the revisions are where it counts.
Hasbro has helpfully published a comprehensive list of the mechanics changes as Updates in the Player’s Handbook (2024) | Dungeons & Dragons, so rather than drain the list, here are the highlights that stood out to me:
The big one is that Races are now Species, and Backgrounds have been reworked and made more important, and the pair are treated as “Origins”. This is massive improvement, gone is the weird racial determinism, and where you grew up is now way more important than where your ancestors came from. There’s some really solid rules for porting an older race or background into the new rules. The half-races are gone, replaced by “real Orcs” and the Aaisimar and Goliaths being called up to the big leagues. Backgrounds in 2014 were kinda just there, a way to pick up a bonus skill proficiency, here they’re the source of the attribute bonus and an actual Feat. Choosing a pair feels like making actual choices about a specific character in a different way that how previous editions would sort of devolve that choice into “choose your favorite Fellowship member”.
Multi-classing and Feats are flushed out and no longer relegated to an “optional because we ran out of time” sidebar. Feats specifically are much closer to where they were in 3e—interesting choices to dial in your character. The they split the difference with the choice you had to make in 5e to either get a stat boost or a feat, you still make that choice, but the stat boost bumps up two stats, and every general feat inclues a single stat boost.
The rules around skills vs tools make sense. At first glance, there don’t seem to be weird overlaps anymore. Tools were one of those undercooked features in 2014, they were kinda like skills, but not? When did you use a tool vs a plain skill check? How do you know what attribute bonus to use? Now, every attribute and skill has a broad description and examples of what you can use them from. Each tool has a full description, including the linked attribute, at least one action you can use it for, and at least one thing you can craft with it. And, each background comes with at least one tool proficiency. You don’t have to guess or make something up on the fly, or worse, remember what you made up last time. It’s not a huge change, but feels done.
Every class has four subclasses in the main book now, which cover a pretty wide spread of options, and sanity has prevailed and all subclasses start at level 3. (In a lot of ways, level 3 is clearly the first “real” level, with the first two as essentially the tutorial, which syncs well with that if you follow the recommended progression, you’ll hit 3rd level at the end of the second session.)
The subclasses are a mix of ones from the 2014 book, various expansions, and new material, but each has gotten a tune up top focus on what the actual fantasy is. To use Monk for example, the subclasses are “Hong Kong movie martial artist”, “ninja assassin”, “airbender”, and, basically, Jet Li from Kiss of the Dragon? The Fighter subclasses have a pretty clear sliding scale of “how complicated do you want to make this for yourself,” spanning “Basic Fighter”, “3rd Edition Fighter”, “Elf from Basic D&D”, and “Psionics Bullshit (Complementary)”.
Weapons now have “Weapon Mastery Properties” that, if you have the right class power or feat, allow you do do additional actions or effects with certain weapons, which does a lot to distinguish A-track fighters from everyone else without just making their attack bonus higher.
The anemic Ideals/Flaws/Bonds thing from 2014 is gone, but in it’s place there’s a really neat set of tables with descriptive words for both high and low attributes and alignment that you can roll against to rough in a personality.
On the other hand, lets talk about whats not here. The last page of the book is not the OGL, and there’s no hint of what any future 3rd party licensing might be. The OGL kerfluffle may have put the 2014 SRD under a CC license, but there’s no indication that there will even be a 2024 SRD.
There’s basically nothing in the way of explicit roleplaying/social hooks; and nothing at all in the way of inter-party hooks. PbtA is a thing, you know? But more to the point, so was Vampire. So was Planescape. There’s a whole stack of 30-year old innovations that just aren’t here.
Similarly there’s no recognition of “the party” as a mechanical construct.
There’s nothing on safety tools or the like; there is a callout box about Session Zero, but not much else. I’m withholding judgement on that one, since it looks like there’s something on that front in the DMG.
There’s very little mechanics for things other than combat; although once again, D&D tends to treat that as a DMG concern.
The other best idea that 4e had was recognizing that “an encounter” was a mechanical construct, but didn’t always have to mean “a fight.” This wasn’t new there, using games I can see from where I’m sitting as an example, Feng Shui was organized around “scenes” in the early 90s. Once you admit an encounter is A Thing, you can just say “this works once an encounter” without having to put on a big show about short rests or whatever, when everyone knows what you mean.
Speaking for myself, as someone who DMs more than he plays, I can’t say as I noticed anything that would change the way I run. The ergonomics and presentation of the book, yes, more different and better player options, yes, but from the other side of the table, they’re pretty much the same game.
Dungeons & Dragons is in a strage spot in the conceptual space. It’s not an explicit generic system like GURPS or Cypher, but it wants to make the Heroic Fantasy tent big enough that it can support pretty much any paperback you find in the fantasy section of the used book store. There’s always been a core of fantasy that D&D was “pretty good at” that got steadily weedier the further you got from it. This incarnation seems to have done a decent job of widening out that center while keeping the weed growth the a minimum.
It seems safe to call this the best version of Dungeons & Dragons to date, and perfectly positioned to do the thing D&D is best at: bring new players into the hobby, get them excited, and then let them move on.
But, of course, it’s double volcano summer, so this is the second revised Fifth Edition this year, after Kobold’s Tales of the Valiant. Alert readers will note that both games made almost the exact same list of changes, but this is less “two asteroid movies” and more “these were the obvious things to go fix.” It’s fascinating how similar they both are, I was expecting to have a whole compare and contrast section here, but not so much! I’m not as tapped into “the scene” as I used to be, so I don’t know how common these ideas were out in the wild, but both books feel like the stable versions of two very similar sets of house rules. It kinda feels like there are going to be a lot of games running a hacked combo of the the two.
(To scratch the compare-and-contrast itch: At first glance, I like the ToV Lineage-Heritage-Background set more than the D&D(2024) Species-Background pair, but the D&D(2024) weapon properties and feats look better than their ToV equivalents. Oh, to be 20 and unemployed again!)
The major difference is that ToV is trying to be a complete game, whereas the 2024 D&D still wants to treat the rest of the post-2014 product line as valid.
As of this writing, both games still have their respective DM books pending, which I suspect is where they’ll really diverge.
More than anything, this reminds me of that 2002-2003 period where people kept knocking out alternate versions of 3e (Arcana Unearthed, Conan, Spycraft, d20 Star Wars, etc, etc) capped off with 3.5. A whole explosion of takes on the same basic frame.
This feels like the point where I should make some kind of recommendation. Should you get it?That feels like one of those “no ethical consumption under capitalism” riddles. Maybe?
To put it mildly, it hasn’t been a bump-free decade for ‘ol Hasbro; recently the D&D group has made a series of what we might politely call “unforced errors,” or if we were less polite “a disastrously mishandled situation or undertaking.”
Most of those didn’t look malevolent, but the sort of profound screwups you get when too many people in the room are middle-aged white guys with MBAs, and not enough literally anyone else. Credit where credit is due, and uncharacteristically for a public-traded American corporation, they seemed to actually be humbled by some of these, and seemed to be making a genuine attempt to fix the systems that got them into a place where they published a book where they updated an existing race of space apes by giving them the exciting new backstory of “they’re escaped slaves!” Or blowing up the entire 3rd party licensing model for no obvious reason. Or sending the literal Pinkertons to someone’s house.
There seems to be an attempt to use the 2024 books to reset. There seems to be a genuine attempt here to get better at diversity and inclusion, to actually move forward. On the other hand, there’s still no sign of what’s going to happen next with the licensing situation.
And this is all slightly fatuous, because I clearly bought it, and money you spend while holding your nose is still legal tender. Your milage may vary.
My honest answer is that if you’re only looking to get one new 5e-compatible PHB this year, I’d recommend you get Tales of the Valiant instead, they’re a small company and could use the sales. If you’re in the market for a second, pick this one up. If you’ve bought in to the 5e ecosystem, the new PHB is probably worth the cover price for the improved ergonomics alone.
Going all the way back to where we started, the last way that D&D is weird is that whether we play it or not, all of us who care about this hobby have a vested interest in Dungeons & Dragons doing well. As D&D goes, so goes the industry: if you’ll forgive a mixed metaphor, when D&D does well the rising tide lifts all boats, but when it does poorly D&D is the Fisher King looking out across a blasted landscape.
If nothing else, I want to live in a world where as many people’s jobs are “RPG” as possible.
D&D is healthier than it’s ever been, and that should give us all a sigh of relief. They didn’t burn the house down and start over, they tried to make a good game better. They’re trying to make it more welcoming, more open, trying to make a big tent bigger. Here in the ongoing Disaster of the Twenties, and as the omni-crisis of 2024 shrieks towards its uncertain conclusion, I’ll welcome anyone trying to make things better.
TV Rewatch: The Good Place
spoilers ahoy
We’ve been rewatching The Good Place. (Or rather, I’ve been rewatching it—I watched it on and off while it was on—everyone else around here is watching it for the first time.)
It is, of course, an absolute jewel. Probably the last great network comedy prior to the streaming/covid era. It’s a masterclass. In joke construction, in structure, in hiding jokes in set-dressing signs. It hits that sweet spot of being both genuinely funny while also have recognizable human emotions, which tends to beyond the grasp of most network sitcoms.
It’s also a case study in why you hire people with experience; Kristen Bell and Ted Danson are just outstanding at the basic skill of “starring in a TV comedy”, but have never as good as they are here. Ted Danson especially is a revelation here, he’s has been on TV essentially my entire life, and he’s better than he’s ever been, but in a way that feels like this is because he finally has material good enough.
But on top of all that, It’s got a really interesting take on what being a “good person” means, and the implications thereof. It’s not just re-heated half-remembered psychology classes, this is a show made by people that have really thought about it. Philosophers get named-dropped, but in a way that indicates that the people writing the show have actually read the material and absorbed it, instead of just leaving a blank spot in the script that said TECH.
Continuing with that contrasting example, Star Trek: The Next Generation spent hours on hours talking about emotions and ethics and morality, but never had an actual take on the concept, beyond a sort of mealy-mouthed “emotions are probably good, unless they’re bad?” and never once managed to be as insightful as the average joke in TGP. It’s great.
I’m gonna put a horizontal line here and then do some medium spoilers, so if you never watched the show you should go do something about that instead of reading on.
...
The Good Place has maybe my all-time favorite piece of narrative sleight of hand. (Other than the season of Doctor Who that locked into place around the Tardis being all four parts of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”)
In the very first episode, a character tells something to another character—and by extension the audience. That thing is, in fact, a lie, but neither the character nor the audience have any reason to doubt it. The show then spends the rest of the first season absolutely screaming at the audience that this was a lie, all while trusting that the audience won’t believe their lying eyes and ignore the mounting evidence.
So, when the shoe finally drops, it manages to be both a) a total surprise, but also b) obviously true. I can’t think of another example of a show that so clearly gives the audience everything they need to know, but trusts them not to put the pieces together until the characters do.
And then, it came back for another season knowing that the audience was in on “the secret” and managed to both be a totally new show and the same show it always was at the same time. It’s a remarkable piece of work.
The next Dr Who Blu Ray release is… Blake’s 7?
It turns out the next Doctor Who blu-ray release is… the first season of Blakes 7? Wait, what? Holy Smokes!
I describe Blake's 7 as “the other, other, other, British Science fiction show”, implicitly after Doctor Who , The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Red Dwarf. Unlike those other three, Blake didn’t get widespread PBS airings in the US (I’m not sure my local PBS channel ever showed it, and it ran everything.)
Which is a shame, because it deserves to be better known. The elevator pitch is essentially The Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai in space”; a group of convicts, desperadoes, and revolutionaries lead a revolt against the totalitarian Earth Federation. In a move that could only be done in the mid-70s, the “evil Federation” is blatantly the Federation from Star Trek, rotted out and gone fascist, following a long line of British SF about fascism happening “here.”
It was made almost entirely by people who had previously worked on Doctor Who, and it shows; while there was never a formal crossover, the entire show feels like a 70s Who episode where the TARDIS just never lands and things keep getting worse. My other joke though, is that whereas Doctor Who’s budget was whatever change they could find in the BBC lobby couch cushions, Blake’s budget was whatever Doctor Who didn’t use. It’s almost hypnotically low budget, with some episodes so cheap that they seem more like avant garde theatre than they do a TV show whose reach is exceeding its grasp.
On the other hand, its got some of the best writing of all time, great characters, great acting. It revels in shades of gray and moral ambiguity decades before that came into vogue. And without spoiling anything, it has one of the all-time great last episodes of any show. It’s really fun. It’s a show I always want to recommend, but I’m not sure it ever got a real home video release in North America.
So a full, plugs out release is long overdue. The same team that does the outstanding Doctor Who blu-ray sets is doing this; same level of restoration, same kind of special features. Apparently, they’re doing “updated special effects”, except some of the original effects team came out of retirement and they’re shooting new model work? Incredible. The real shame is that so many of the people behind the show have since passed; both main writers, several of the actors, including the one who played the best character. Hopefully there’s some archive material to fill in the gaps.
Blake ran for 4 years, presumably the Doctor Who releases will stay and 2 a year with Blake getting that third slot.
Happy Bell Riots to All Who Celebrate
Stay safe out there during one of the watershed events of the 21st century! I was going to write something about how the worst dystopia Star Trek could imagine in the mid-90s is dramatically, breathtakingly better than the future we actually got, but jwz has the roundup of people who already did.
Can you imagine the real San Franciso of 2024 setting aside a couple of blocks for homeless people to live? To hand out ration cards? For there to be infrastructure?
Like all good Science Fiction, Deep Space Nine doesn’t say a lot about the future, but it sure says an awful lot about the time in which it was written.
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…