Ben Paddon

Tag: Doctor Who

  • Breaking Broadcast: How Social Networking is Killing the TV Viewing Experience

    BE ADVISED: While the post itself doesn’t contain any spoilers, there are two inline images that contain spoilers for for Game of Thrones season one, and Saturday’s Doctor Who series 7 premiere “Asylum of the Daleks”. You have been warned.

    It takes a lot, a lot, to get me watching a new TV show these days. It’s not because I’m a hipster who doesn’t want to watch the same thing everyone else is watching (though I will confess that in my teens I avoided the Harry Potter novels and films specifically because all of my friends were obsessed with the bloody things), but because most current shows have been thoroughly, utterly ruined for me by everybody on the internet everywhere ever before I’ve even had a chance to read a series synopsis.

    Everybody is talking about Breaking Bad at the moment. Everybody. It’s the show’s final season – or, as is my understanding, the first half of its final season, the rest of which will be shown in the new year – and the internet is ablaze. People are nattering about it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and all those other social networks I’m not hip enough to know about yet. Also Google+. Tumblr in particular is rather boisterous, with people posting quotes, clips of the show in subtitled GIF format, and reams of fanart based on episodes that aired less than 24 hours prior.

    Now you know how Game of Thrones season one ends. Thanks, internet.

    Breaking Bad isn’t the only show that suffers this problem, either. The pilot for CBS’ Elementary, their attempt to modernize Sherlock Holmes following the BBC’s rather successful go of it, recently leaked, and within minutes people on Tumblr were posting quotes, breakdowns and, of course, GIFs. Doctor Who‘s seventh series also started this Saturday in the UK, and Tumblr had already thoroughly ruined the show long before the east coast premiere rolled along later that night.

    When Game of Thrones is running on HBO, damn near everybody on the internet knows what happened in the latest episode whether they’re watching it or not. When a new episode of Community airs, Tumblr almost immediately becomes a Dan Harmon fansite, and remains that way for the following 48 hours.

    Tumblr cannot help but build its nest out of screengrabs, spoilers and snippets like a demented pop culture magpie. Amidst it all, the by now familiar cries of “ALL THE FEELS”, “DEAD” and “ASDFJGFGJKSDJK”, punctuated by reaction GIFs that inexplicably also spoil other shows and films you haven’t managed to get around to seeing yet.

    For someone who spends a lot of time on Tumblr, this represents an enormous problem – seeing a TV show you want to watch becomes not just entertainment but a social obligation; something you have to do to avoid being behind the curve. This means torrenting the show before it comes up on Hulu the next day (or, in the case of Doctor Who, after it airs on the BBC but before its North American premiere on BBC America or SPACE), or, if you’re one of those people who still inexplicably has cable, actually sitting down to watch the show as it goes out live.

    Imagine that for a moment – having to actually schedule your life around a television show. What is this, the Dark Ages?

    A lovely piece of Doctor Who fanart that, if you haven’t seen “Asylum of the Daleks” yet, has the potential to utterly ruin the climax of the episode for you. [Source: Wil Wheaton, via Tumblr]
    DVRs and digital distribution are a Godsend – they allow us to digest content at our leisure.  We are in a golden age of television not just because of shows like Louie, Breaking Bad and Doctor Who, but because we are no longer shackled to the television, forced to watch something as it goes out. We can record it or, better still, log on to Hulu or the iPlayer, to watch when convenient for us.

    But to anybody who is active on a social network like Tumblr, that freedom is countered by the desire not to have your favourite show utterly and irrevokably ruined by some well-meaning fan who absolutely has to draw a picture of that new character in the latest episode right fucking now, utterly ruining the plot twist for the episode in the process.

    Even webseries like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries are chewed up and spat out by social network users – why sit down to watch the show when it’s already splattered all over my dashboard in GIF form?

    There are, of course, ways of avoiding this flurry of spoilers. You could install Tumblr Savior, a plugin that allows you to block posts including certain words or hashtags (such as, for instance, #doctor who or #breaking bad). It’s not an ideal solution, however – for a start, it’s predicated on the person posting about the show actually tagging the post, or even including the words you’re blocking. Not ideal if that person you’re following for their exceptional fanart doesn’t tag any of their posts or even post text in their image posts.

    I could avoid Tumblr and Twitter entirely, but that feels like not going to a bar simply because you don’t like the house ale, or deciding not to visit an art gallery because you know they’re currently running an exhibit of paintings by an artist you don’t like. It’s like throwing your iPod out the window because you might hear an Alanis Morissette song, and you’re just not in the mood to listen to “Head Over Feet” right now.

    While these two solutions might keep me safe from the shows I’m actively watching, like Community and Doctor Who, it doesn’t save the shows I haven’t started watching yet, like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. I’ve seen neither show yet, not even so much as a pilot, because while Tumblr has convinced me that I absolutely have to see them, it’s also ruined every single fucking plot point in every episode that’s broadcast. There’s no point in ordering any box sets, no real sense in adding a show to my Netflix queue, when I already know what’s going to happen. These shows have, in a very real sense, been spoiled.

    So my answer, when people nag me about why I haven’t started watching obviously brilliant TV shows yet, is that I simply can’t anymore. I crave new experiences, new stories and new media, but social networking is actively preventing me from receiving those things. Short of stepping away from these platforms and declaring myself a digital hermit, I don’t really know what else to do.

    Y’know, other than just watching the shows to watch them. Which is obviously madness.

  • Comic-Con Round-Up Exclamation Mark

    I almost never take photos these days. I don’t photograph my friends, because, y’know, they’re my friends. If I find myself wondering what my friends look like I can pick up a phone and say, “Hey, are you busy today?” If the answer is no, it’s usually less than an hour before we’re in each other’s company getting ready to go bowling or some shit. As the door opens and I see their grim visage, my concerns are abated. Yes, my mind says. He does still look like that.

    Most notably, taking photos cheapens a moment for me. It impinges on the memory of an event to have to stop, and pose, and contort my face into some grim position so as to make sure that my photo, or indeed someone else’s photo, doesn’t look like photographic evidence of some harrowing tea party populated by the damned.

    So it’s a little odd that I woke up this morning at just after 10am, having arrived back in Los Angeles from my single day in San Diego for their annual comic’d con, saddened by my lack of photographic evidence of the event. No photos of myself and Lar, talking and laughing about some manner of bullshit for upwards of thirty solid minutes. No pictures of my casually implying to the wonderful, wonderful people at the Blank Label Comics booth that Kris Straub may (or may not!) be offering blowjobs. No pictures of Kris Straub, for obvious reasons.

    I have no photos. Instead, all I have is memories. For the first time, that doesn’t quite feel like enough.

    I was only able to attend Comic-Con for one day this year, but I had the greatest convention experience of my life. Actually it may more accurately be described as the greatest convention experiences, being as it was made up of small (but important!) experiences that all add up to one whole.

    My personal favourite, though? My good friend Ray, who will be marrying his equally good girlfriend Michelle next year, asked me to be his Best Man. I have crippling self-esteem issues, and consider myself to be the worst man pretty much all year ’round, but I can tolerate being the best for a single day. My body can take it.

    What follows is five paragraphs about Penny Arcade. You may not like them. Or maybe you will! That’s not really my call.

    I spent rather a lot of time talking to the P’Arc’s Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik (mostly to Jerry) about a number of subjects, to the extent that casual observers might have thought us close acquaintances. I spoke to Jerry about how his writing, both in the comic and elsewhere, fires me up. It does. It inspires me. Over the last thirteen-or-so years he’s found his voice, and it is enchanting. I hope some day to find mine, and I hope it’s even half as brilliant as his.

    Jerry and Mike get a second bullet-point, because we spoke briefly about the Discovery. I raised a question at their Q&A (which I did not attend on purpose, but whatevs) about how the gaming press and PR machines, which are often one in the same, bombard us with pre-release information, generating false hype for games that, really, don’t deserve them. It is the job of PR people to get us excited for the shit their clients excrete, and game journalists appear to have taken part of that responsibility on themselves. Consequently, as people constantly buy into the hype, that sense of Discovery that we have playing new games as kids – coming home to find our parents have bought us some new thing to try on our computer boxes – is gone. Even in my teens I bought games I thought looked cool, ignoring magazines entirely.

    I wondered if the Discovery had died, and I was very happy to learn that not only did Jerry and Mike share my thoughts on the Discovery, but that Mike has been actively trying to restore (or rediscover) it by ignoring pre-release materials and promotional bullshit. It was nice having my opinions vindicated and even shared by the guys who last year employed a man who disagrees with my stance on literally every goddamn thing relating to the gaming press to run their gaming news operation.

    On the subject of their Kickstarter… look, I was pissed off on Day One. I tweeted about it a lot from my GameJournos account. Day two, which I think was Thursday, I woke up and realized I didn’t actually give anything even vaguely resembling a shit. I’m excited about the new content that Jerry and Mike want to get (as a huge, huge fan of their prohibition-era scifi setting Automata, the idea of getting more of that is positively appetite-whetting) and their Strip Search webseries looks like it may not be terrible either.

    Some seem to believe that replacing a serviceable revenue stream that has a noted, diminished impact on their personal creative output with another that lets them run riot is, in some way, counter to the very purpose for which Kickstarter was intended. I propose that Kickstarter could not have been designed for anything else.

    A few other Comic-Con points of interest:

    • MC Frontalot is earnest, approachable, and will listen to his fans ramblings. Specifically my ramblings. He was very polite.
    • My friend Heather’s Post-Apocalyptic Snow White costume looked incredible. I’d seen it when she was working on it, but that’s rather like looking at a souffle before it’s had a chance to rise. It looked incredible. I realize I have already typed those exact words, but they remain relevant.
    • I bumped into a short, round Asian man dressed as Catwoman. I was dressed as a Gotham City Impostors Batman. We had an awkward moment, then spent two minutes talking about our secret love for each other. That, too, was awkward, but fun. So that’s something.
    • My dad charged me with a sacred purpose – procure one of the Comic-Con exclusive The Hobbit posters. I failed, mostly because The Hobbit had, I don’t know, sixteen bloody booths at the con. That’s an exaggeration obviously (even a blind moron with severe developmental issues could see that!!), but finding the location to procure such a poster, if they were even still available, was not a task I was able to complete. Sorry, dad.
    • QMx have some incredible stuff on display, and I feel very privileged to have been working in the office as much of this stuff was in development. Two of the things they have that I didn’t get to see before the show, though, are the 1:6 scale TARDIS replica, and the model of the Enterprise-D from TNG, which looked positively lickable. (Andy, if you’re reading this, I did not lick the Enterprise-D.)
    • I regret every decision I’ve ever made in my life that led me to the purchase of a $5 convention center hot dog.

    Thus concludes this. I’ll be back to regular blogging next week, because that’s a thing I do now.

  • Whovie

    An example of exactly the sort of thing that should never, ever happen.

    There has been a lot of talk over the last few years about a potential Doctor Who movie. Rather a lot of people seem to think this is an absolutely terrible idea, and given the track record I don’t particularly blame them.

    Perhaps even worse is that the potential for a Doctor Who movie to be an awful mess is not only a worst-case scenario for fans, but also a very real possibility: Last year Harry Potter director David Yates claimed he was actively working on a Doctor Who movie that would be starting “from scratch,” and the year before that Russell T Davies shot down a rumour that Johnny Depp would be starring in a movie as a version of the Doctor, travelling around the world, curing diseases and fighting Daleks.

    Adding insult to injury, I recall reading somewhere that Davies actually liked the idea proposed by the rumour, though I can’t find anything about that online. If the man responsible for Doctor Who‘s triumphant return truly believes that such an awful, awful idea is actually worthy of consideration, then the good Doctor’s cinematic future does not look especially bright.

    We all know what the fans want – they want something connected to the TV show. They want something that serves connects to the series in much the same way the X-Files movie was a part of the TV show continuity (though X-Files: Fight the Future might not be the best example). They want a movie featuring the current Doctor, whomever that may be at the time, ad his current companions.

    That’s a pretty good list – and we know it’s good, because current showrunner Steven Moffat wants exactly the same thing – but the fans probably wouldn’t stop there. They’d likely want to see some, or all, of the Doctor’s greatest foes – the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, the Sontarans, the Weeping Angels, the Silurians, the Ice Warriors. They’d probably want to see multiple incarnations of the Doctor. They’d want something rife with canon ejaculate, a celebration of everything Doctor Who is.

    Which is entirely the wrong way to go with it.

    Too many cooks spoil the plot.

    Let’s face it, if fans got everything they wanted we’d probably end up with something not too dissimilar from “The Five Doctors”, which is a fun story but not especially well-written, or something along the lines of “The Stolen Earth”/”Journey’s End,” which is a tangled mess of comic-book style crossover that lacks a good pay-off and isn’t able to properly accommodate all of the characters that have been shoehorned into the narrative.

    So, what’s the logical middle-ground? A Doctor Who movie would need to be big bold, brash and every bit the spectacle of the television series, existing within the continuity of the television series but not necessarily drawing heavily from it so as to serve as a jumping-on point for potential newcomers. It would need to stand alone as a story, basically, complete with a unique villain or threat that hadn’t been seen in the television series before.

    Basically, it would need the same approach that Moffat takes to writing his Christmas specials.

    Steven Moffat has commented on the structure of the Christmas stories; that you have to write for a different audience when writing for a show that’s going out on Christmas day – the core of the Doctor as a man who arrives in the TARDIS and fixes things must be preserved, but beyond that the story needs to work for people who have never seen the show before. Great Christmas television takes precedence over a great episode of Doctor Who, and while some of the best Doctor Who stories include episodes like “The Christmas Invasion” and “The Next Doctor”, one cannot argue that these do not make for especially good Christmas day viewing to anyone who isn’t already a fan of the series.

    This wouldn’t make for a good movie either, to be honest.

    Obviously I’m not suggesting that a Doctor Who movie be a Christmas affair or be devoid of scifi elements, and obviously Moffat’s Christmas offerings so far have been far from feature quality (the only Christmas special I think would make a halfway decent movie is probably “Voyage of the Damned”, which isn’t even the best Christmas special), but I feel Moffat’s approach to the Christmas episodes would be ideal for a feature film. Fuse that with the sort of storytelling we saw in “The Pandorica Opens”/”The Big Bang” or “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead” and I think we’d have a pretty solid Doctor Who movie on our hands.

    Just don’t let David Yates anywhere near it. Please. For the love of Glod.

  • Arrested Development, Arrested

    Try not to dwell on the MSPaint-looking “Closed” sign.

    Next year, Arrested Development returns after having been mercilessly cancelled by Fox back in 2006. Ten brand spanking new episodes are being produced for distribution exclusively via Netflix, which is very exciting news for fans of great comedy.

    My worry, though, is that the new Arrested Development is going to make the same mistake that other similarly revived shows made upon their triumphant returns. Shows brought back from the brink of disaster have a worrying habit of wasting their second chance nodding at their past rather than looking optimistically towards their future.

    Two of my favourite shows, Futurama and Red Dwarf, were revived in recent years, and both fell prey to nostalgia. The first of the straight-to-DVD Futurama movies, “Bender’s Big Score”, seemed to hinge almost entirely on winks to the audience, nostalgic self-referential gags, and “Hey, remember this minor character and/or in-joke?” moments. “Into The Wild Green Yonder”, the fourth and final Futurama movie, also ended on a very forced note that tried to wrap up as many elements of the show as possible very quickly while also providing an opening should the show return for a full season (as it did last year, with somewhat disappointing results).

    Similarly, the 2009 Red Dwarf miniseries “Back to Earth” intentionally recycled and referenced elements of previous episodes rather than making the effort to stand out and be it’s own thing. While in Red Dwarf‘s case this can be forgiven to an extent – the miniseries was an anniversary event intended to celebrate the series – it does unfortunately mean that, as a story, “Back to Earth” struggles to stand on its own two feet.

    Other successful show revivals such as Doctor Who and Family Guy somehow found it within themselves to soldier onward almost as though they’d never been off the air (aside from the opening scene of Family Guy‘s fourth season, which pokes fun at the Fox Network’s predilection for greenlighting and cancelling shows almost in the same breath).

    With Doctor Who, then-showrunner Russell T Davies made a very deliberate choice not to refer heavily to the classic series, despite being a continuation. This made the first episode much more accessible and, more importantly, didn’t bog it down in self-reference and continuity. Anyone can watch “Rose” and enjoy it, but I have a hard time imagining non-Futurama fans getting much out of “Bender’s Big Score”.

    The new Arrested Development ultimately has to make good on the promise that “new” implies – new stories featuring the same characters. No wasting time paying lip-service to the past, just focusing on what’s to come. If they can check that box, if they can get through the ten episodes without relying too heavily on Remember-Whens and in-jokes, then they can’t go wrong.

    Y’know, unless it sucks.

  • No More Two-Parters in Doctor Who? Why I Don’t Think We Can Take Moffat at His Word.

    WARNING: The following post contains spoilers for Doctor Who’s sixth series. You have been warned. I should also point out that, despite my employers’ connections with the BBC, I have zero foreknowledge of Series 7.

    Oh no! Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat rocked the very foundation of the show by announcing way back in December that there probably won’t be any two-part stories in Series 7. This seems rather silly on the surface considering Moffat’s dedication and utter love for the show, but especially considering how vocal he has been about preserving the atmosphere of the show – the very reason he’s touted for deciding to move the series premiere from the traditional March/April start to some time in the Autumn.

    Yet oddly, it’s that very reasoning that has me thinking that perhaps we can’t trust the words that tumbled from Moffat’s mouth last year, especially as he’s already proven himself to be an entirely untrustworthy showrunner. Moffat is very big on keeping secrets from the viewership, going so far as to intentionally mislead the public with announcements of stuff that definitely isn’t happening, which then goes on to happen.

    I find it difficult to believe that Moffat would make a statement that effectively brings an end to part of Doctor Who’s enduring appeal. Although the serialized nature of the show has been toned down since its revival in 2005 the cliffhangers have remained an important part of the show. It’s not without good reason that Russell T Davies opted to include three two-part stories each series, a template Moffat kept for the show’s fifth series. Why, then, would he turn around and decide to abandon such an integral part of the show for its 50th anniversary?

    Of course, looking at the second half of Series 6, it’s easy to see how he may approach the cliffhangers instead. “A Good Man Goes To War” and “Closing Time” are both great examples of stories that are ostensibly standalone, but that end with cliffhangers that either lead into or otherwise tease the next episode of the show. And what is the first fifteen minutes of “The Impossible Astronaut” if not a cliffhanger for the entire series?

    Nevertheless, these cliffhangers are much less overt than in previous stories. Most viewers had more or less figured out that the impossible astronaut was River Song, and so the ending of “Closing Time” lost most of its impact before broadcast.

    A good Doctor Who cliffhanger – a great Doctor Who cliffhanger, in fact – leaves the Doctor and/or his companions in a point of absolute peril, a dangerous scenario from which there appears to be no escape, perhaps best summed up by Moffat himself as “The monsters are coming.” In fact some of the show’s best cliffhangers since its return are Moffat’s own; “The Empty Child”, “Silence in the Library” and “The Pandorica Opens” are some of the most memorable and thrilling cliffhangers in the show’s history.

    Reaching back even further, classic fan favourites like “The Caves of Androzani” and “Genesis of the Daleks” are defined as much by their episode climaxes as they are by the narrative itself, especially in the former story where the show plays with the audience’s expectation that the then-current Doctor, Peter Davison, is to die and regenerate.

    Is Moffat really willing to discard such an important part of the show’s popularity? Or has Doctor Who outgrown the cliffhanger? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t bet money on our intrepid showrunner abandoning this staple just yet. Certainly not when there’s such a major anniversary on the horizon.

  • Doctor, Doctor, Can’t You See I’m Burnin’, Burnin’

    There’s a moment in “Rose”, the very first episode of the revived Doctor Who, where the Ninth Doctor briefly addresses his appearance, like so:

    Common fan theory is that the Doctor arrived in London, picked out his new clothes, realized the Nestine Consciousness was present and up to the business of conquest, and so set to the task of stopping them. Most fans place conspiract theorist Clive’s pictures of the Doctor as occurring during the time between his leaving leaves without Rose and his return a few seconds later to inform her that the TARDIS “also travels in time”. I don’t.

    Why? Simple, really. The Ninth and Tenth Doctors experienced survivor’s guilt after being solely responsible for the destruction of the Time Lords, and I’m personally of the opinion that after the Doctor regenerated into his ninth incarnation he simply wasn’t capable of looking at himself in the mirror. He wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t. He couldn’t look himself in the eyes and see what he’d done.

    But in the scene above, he doesn’t have a choice – the Tylers have a mirror in their front room, and the Doctor sees his own reflection for the first time in, potentially, years (although I’m inclined to say it’s only been a few months, but then this is all fanwank anyway so it’s more or less a non-isssue). Looking in the mirror, it turns out, is easier than he expected it to be.

    Or something. I don’t know. This just popped into my head and I felt like typing it out somewhere.

  • A Funny Turn – on the subject of Russell T Davies and clunky writing

    I’ve been watching and rewatching a lot of Doctor Who lately, partially because I’m hard at work on three separate Doctor Who related projects (nothing official, o’ course – just some fun fan stuff) but mostly because… well, I love the show. I grew up with it, with Tom Baker and Peter Davison. My earliest Doctor Who memory is of “The Mind Robber”, seeing Jamie McCrimmon’s face being jumbled up. It horrified me as a child. It still sends tingles down my spine, even today.

    The fourth series of the revived show is probably the second-most uneven series of the show to date, right behind the second series, and yet both series contain some of my favourite episodes of the show. One such episode is “Turn Left”, an alternate-history episode that retells some of the events of the third and fourth series in a universe where the Doctor died. It’s a wonderful episode, brilliantly grim, if a bit over-the-top at times. However there’s one moment in the episode that I cannot take seriously:

    Torchwood fans try to pretend Ianto Jones never died. Some Doctor Who fans deem the ’96 TV Movie to be non-canonical. Me? I would happily remove this single shot from the show’s 48-year history without a moment’s hesitation.

    It’s a moment that is simply too over-the-top. It’s too silly, too ridiculous, too much after seeing London get nuked off of the planet. It’s not just the pointing, either. It’s the shaking of the head, the glare, the malice. It doesn’t work. It comes across as ridiculously cheesy, and in an episode as bleak as this it becomes unintentionally hilarious.

    I wanted to know how the scene read on the page, on Russell T Davies’ original shooting script, and fortunately enough it’s one of the many Doctor Who scripts available to download from the promotional site for “The Writer’s Tale”. So I downloaded it and had a look:

    It’s a nice piece of action text, but… well, it still doesn’t work. It tries to hammer home a point from an earlier scene – the Spanish maid can see the space beetle on Donna’s back – it’s too much. Too clunky. Too forced. If it were up to me, I’d remove the Spanish maid from this shot entirely. She’s superfluous, telling the audience something that they already know. No, it’s worse – she’s repeating it, so soon after having already reminded them of it.

    Or, alternatively, can her presence in the scene be amended? Can her contribution to this moment be fixed? I at least thought it was worth having a stab at:

    [CeltX added a line break into the second paragraph during the export process. No idea why.]

    Is this any better? Well, no. I’ve tried to tone down the maid’s reaction, to make it seem more real, more human. But she still feels unnecessary. Her presence muddies the tone of the scene. What is supposed to be a tragedy, a disaster, is then punctuated by something awkward, shoehorned into the scene in an attempt to serve the overall narrative, and backfiring.

    But then, that’s something of a calling card of Russell T Davies’, isn’t it?

  • On death, television, and Ianto Jones

    SPOILER ALERT! This post contains spoilers for Buffy the Vampire Slayer season six, and spoilers throughout the entirety of Torchwood. (more…)