This week we get all literary with reviews of two modern adaptations of classic works: the new TV show Selfie (on ABC Tuesday nights at 8pm) based on My Fair Lady and one of our favorite web series, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries based on Pride and Prejudice.
It’s just too bad this doesn’t count as homework.
I can’t believe Dracula Untold got made. It’s an amazing jumble of nonsensical film parts that I can only believe the pitch meeting between screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless and the development executive at Universal went something like this:
Matt: So, we want to make a Dracula movie that tells the origin story of the most famous vampire in the world.
Executive: Great! Universal has a rich history of making horror movies with iconic characters like this. We’d love to get in the business of making a good horror movie to rescue vampires from being such a punch line in chick lit.
Burk: Oh, no, this isn’t a horror movie. It’s going to be more like the 300 movies. It’ll be a dark atmosphere-y old war movie like that.
Executive: That sounds good too. A brave town hunkering down as they have to defend themselves from the unspeakable horror of the first ever vampire. I still like it a lot.
Matt: Dracula is going to be the good guy in this movie. He’s going to fight the army of the Ottoman Empire.
Executive: Ok, I guess anti-heroes have always done good business and having him fight against a giant army might be interesting. We’ve seen vampires overwhelm individuals but an army of thousands of people might pose an interesting challenge.
Burk: He’s going to kill thousands of people effortlessly in seconds, there won’t be a moment in the film where you believe that anyone is a legitimate challenge to Dracula’s power.
Executive: Well…that’s an interesting way to handle conflict. I think I can still greenlight this movie, if we drop it in October no one will notice it isn’t a scary movie until we already have a lot of their money. Can you at least make a bunch of scenes that feel like they come straight out of Game of Thrones?
Matt: Absolutely, we even already have Charles “Tywin Lannister” Dance himself already attached.
Executive: Great! Is $70 million enough to get this movie in to theaters?
Suffice to say this didn’t produce a great movie. All origin movies have to deal with a certain feeling of inevitability but the good ones manage to do things that shine a new light on the stores we’ve heard a million times. Dracula Untold decides to tell us the parts of the story no one ever cared enough about to ask. I’m not in to Dracula movies to see Dracula care about his family or struggle with the burden of ruling Transylvania. I want to see vampire stuff, victims being stalked and seduced and the like. Dracula Untold gives that to me in the last three minutes of the movie. It’s like making a Superman movie where he doesn’t save Lois Lane until the end credits are rolling. There are a lot of movies this could have been and some of them might have even been satisfying but this was a terrible vampire movie and I would call it a disgrace to the name Dracula but I’ve seen Dracula 2000.
There’s one of two things you can be almost guaranteed of when you see a story that takes place on a train – romance, or a murder.
MUMMY ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS
By Jamie Mathieson
Directed by Paul Wilmshurst
As a farewell fling, The Doctor takes Clara on a trip aboard the Orient Express in space, exactingly copied from the original, except for the bit about being spaceworthy. It becomes quickly apparent that all is not well on the craft – a mysterious unseen beast is killing people exactly 66 seconds after the victim sees it – and no one else does. It turns out this particular journey is a massive two-fold trap – the ship is filled with scientists versed in areas of research that pertain to the beast, and are pressed into service to capture it, by any means necessary.
The Doctor quickly joins the press gang, understanding that the only way to gain data is to have the next victim detail as much as they can before they are killed. Clara does not take well to this process, but when she is asked to bring to him the person they predict to be the next victim, she does what all The Doctor’s friends do – what she’s told.
A tight thriller with a new look at a classic monster, with a massively emotional line running through the story, resulting in one of the most naked-baring dialogue at the end ever seen. The new season of the series of amazingly dark, especially in the analysis of the relationship between The Doctor and his friends. By story’s end, we realize Clara has been doing something all season, and is totally at peace with it – lying.
GUEST STAR REPORT – It’s an interesting week, with only one exception, the entire major guest cast has appeared on Doctor Who in one form or another in the past, including the audio plays.
Frank Skinner (Perkins) is a well-known stand-up comic, TV presenter, and regular on Britain’s massive number of panel shows like QI and Have I Got News For You. A long-time fan of Doctor Who, he’s been campaigning for a role on the show since its inception. He had a cameo in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot as a Dalek operator. He’s also a major fan of British music hall legend George Formby, and hosted a documentary about the man in 2011.
Foxes (lounge singer) is a pop singer making quite a name for herself in the UK with her experimental style electronic pop. She appeared on the song “Clarify” by Zedd, which won the 2014 Grammy for Best Dance Recording. Her latest album, Glorious”, came out in February to positive reviews.
David Bamber (Captain Quell) appeared with David Walliams and Mark Williams in the adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings, and in the recent project by the two thirds of the League of Gentlemen who aren’t Mark Gatiss, Psychoville.
Christopher Villiers (Professor Moorhouse) is one of a pair of Who-lumni this episode, appearing in The King’s Demons from the original series. He played Sir Kay in First Knight, and a favorite in our house Nigel in Top Secret! (“How do we know he’s NOT Mel Torme?”)
Janet Henfrey (Mrs. Pitt) Last appeared in Doctor Who as Miss Hardaker in The Curse of Fenric. She had a part in the revamped version of Randall and Hopkirk (deceased), a show that featured the work of a large number of people who went on to work on Doctor Who. She’ll next appear with matt Smith in the film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (and Zombies).
John Sessions (Gus) was a regular panelist on the original British version of Whose Line is it Anyway, and is a recurring guest on QI. He’s done quite a lot of voice work for Doctor Who, in the Big Finish audio plays and the webcast Death Comes to Time. He’ll be playing Hunpty Dumpty in the upcoming Alice in Wonderland sequel. He joins a growing number of well-known actors to lend their voice only to the series.
THE MONSTER FILES – The Foretold is a wonderful example of taking a classic monster and giving it a modern sci-fi twist. The Doctor has seen his share of Mummies in the past. The Osiran race took up residence on Mars (a very popular planet in the series’ history) and influenced the growth of Egyptian culture, an influence that attempted to make a jump to the present in Pyramids of Mars. We’ve seen other classic Universal monsters as well – werewolves in Victorian England (Tooth and Claw) alien races who were quite pleasant when they weren’t in their alternate form (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) and various other wolf-like transformations like from Inferno and Planet of Evil. He even met Frankenstein’s Monsters, albeit only an android copy, in a disused fun fair during The Chase.
BACKGROUND BITS AND BOBS –
KILL THE QUEEN! – The lounge singer performing what is by now a centuries old song (“Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen) which is certainly supposed to represent the contemporary music of the period of the original Orient Express is a callback to Lady Cassandra playing a “traditional ballad” during The End of the World, namely Britney Spears’ “Toxic”.
BOW TIES ARE…WELL… – The Doctor is wearing a bow tie again, but it’s the style he wore back in the Hartnell years, keeping with the style of dress he’s been wearing all season.
WOULD YOU LIKE A… – Eschewing the traditional rumpled paper bag, The Doctor now carries his Jelly Babies in a dashing cigarette case. That’s not the only Tom Baker reference in the episode – when The Doctor has the conversation with himself, his “other voice” takes on just a tinge of the booming tone of the fourth Doctor.
HOW LONG CAN YOU HOLD YOUR BREATH? – The Doctor can go without oxygen for quite some time, thanks to the Gallifreyan respiratory bypass system, first referenced in the Tom Baker adventure The Ark in Space.
“It’s a sad smile, it’s two emotions at once” – The Doctor once admitted to be confused at “happy crying” in the company of the Ponds. He’s had trouble understanding Human emotion in the past, he’s just made more of a career of it this season.
“The number of evil twice over” – While most modern people acquaint 666 with evil, 33 appears in a number of religious doctrines, and pops up in an interesting number of coincidental places in a plurality of schools of knowledge. This website lists a great deal of them.
“It’s full of…bubble wrap” – Bubble wrap has a long association with the series, usually as a material for making monsters and sets. Most famously it made up much of the skin of the growing Wirrn creatures in The Ark In Space.
“Even the smallest details might help us save the next one” – Once again, we’re seeing The Doctor having no remorse of sadness for someone’s passing, wishing only to use them as a tool to solve a larger problem. It’s what Clara assumes he’ll do to Maisie later in the story.
“Are you my mummy?” – I honestly thought they might choose not to go with this line. A reference to the Eccleston thriller The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, he made a similar joke while wearing a gas mask in The Poison Sky.
“That job could change a man” – Perkins was referring to how travelling like that could change passengers in the TARDIS, and The Doctor was referring to himself. Both are correct.
BIG BAD WOLF REPORT – Danny is only heard from via the phone, but once again, his and Clara’s relationship are where the big moves in the narrative take place. While there’s still a dangling mystery as to the identity of Gus, there’s no being sure that he’s working with Missy, Queen of Heaven.
“He even phoned the TARDIS” – The Doctor got a call at the end of The Big Bang about an incident on the Orient Express In Space. The details were a bit off from what we’re seeing here, but the point it clear – Gus has been trying to get The Doctor’s attention to solve this problem for a very long time, and is fully aware of who he is. We’ve had mention of the difficulty of getting the number to the TARDIS already, so this person has access to very secret information.
“But thanks for lying” – It’s the second line spoken by The Doctor in the episode – and it’s the main theme of the episode. It’s spoken about, referred to, and joked about right through to the end of the story. Maisie accuses The Doctor of lying as soon as she hears the first thing out of his mouth, The Doctor Lies about why he asks Clara to eventually actually lie to Maisie. The Doctor claims he’s lying about getting everyone way safely, but he’s lying about that. And at the end, Clara flat out lies to The Doctor about her turnaround about travelling with him, which means she will go right on lying to Danny about not doing it anymore.
“I am so sorry” – It’s key to note that now it’d The Doctor’s companion who is doing the apologizing, what Ten used to do so often it became a meme.
“So you were pretending to be heartless” – There such amazing levels going on in these final scenes. The Doctor has clearly gotten more brunt in his attitude, using dying people as stepping stones to a solution. But in the next moment we learn something important – for a guy who claims to be terrible with names, he remembers the name of each person he couldn’t same. He’s still keeping count, even through he’s hiding it better than ever.
“Is it like…an addiction?” – Let’s analyze Clara’s behavior throughout the season. She’s keeps trying to convince herself that she can “handle it”. She attempts to restrict her access by only doing it occasionally. She puts herself in danger to get what she wants. She lies to those she loves about what she’s doing, and after swearing this is the last time, she decides it’s not. So…you tell me; how good is her analysis?
NEXT ON DOCTOR WHO! Experimentation by an unknown alien source is leaving some people feeling a little…Oh, I just can’t DO it!. Flatline, coming this Saturday.
What Fools These Mortals Be: The Story of Puck, America’s First and Most Influential Magazine of Color Political Cartoons • 328 pages, IDW Publishing, $59.99 (Amazon, $40.64)
Once upon a time, mere mortal cartoonists held rockstar sway over American electoral politics via a wildly popular periodical that, early in its more than 40 year run. actually got their guy into the White House.
Let us now return to those halcyon days when men were men and cartoonists were gods.
These are your great-great grandfather’s political cartoons: dense, colorful and full of coded graphic allusions, mini-masterpieces as indecipherable to most modern day minds as The Daily Show’s Photoshopped on-screen graphics – arguably Puck’s progeny — would have been to our ancestors. But fret not, because all you really need to know to take a deep dive into this inky pool of polychromous political effulgence is that the message is always basically the same, most often aimed at men in power that the publishers deemed too big for their britches: Puck You!
“Cartoons are partly shaped by their publishing environment,” notes Bill Watterson rather dryly in the book’s Foreword, “and the artistry of cartoons expands in those rare times when it’s given some encouragement and open territory.”
Co-authors Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West do not overestimate Puck’s influence as a progressive publication born of game-changing advances in printing technology, and this lush IDW book in The Library of American Comics collection lays it all out in livid color undoubtedly brighter than the ephemeral pulp upon which these mighty influential political cartoons were originally printed.
Nowadays, the magazine is largely forgotten, though Puck himself – the magazine’s smirking mascot, borrowed from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – still stands sentinel above the entrance to The Puck Building in Manhattan, as if eager to skewer modern day gilded age guys and gals who flock there for fabulous parties in a space that once roared with lithographic presses… that is, if he wasn’t so busy looking at his own reflection in his gilded hand mirror.
The Story of Puck reprints – in color – the works of such iconic cartoonists as Joseph Keppler, F. Opper, John Held, Rose O’Neill, James Montgomery Flagg, Rube Goldberg, and many others. These cartoons require annotations for context, and the authors oblige, in exhausting academic detail, including a handy biographical index, but you don’t need to be a history geek to revel in these pages.
However, you will need to shell out about sixty bucks for a book that weighs in about the same as a small litho stone. Would’ve been good if this volume included some of the full-color ads that made the publication of the satirical cartoons possible. What fools these mortals be!
It’s interesting to watch Green Arrow thrive on television in ways he could only envy in the comics. After being a second string character for much of his career, he seemed to work well first on Smallville, and now on his own series, Arrow. The problem, though, with being a B-lister for decades is that his rogues’ gallery is woefully weak and therefore the show’s producers have to dip into the rest of the DC mythos to fill out his world.
The show’s third season gets underway shortly and Warner Home Entertainment has recently released Arrow: The Complete Second Season in a nice box set. Here, we can review all 23 episodes to see how things have evolved as Oliver Queen goes from vigilante to hero while his allies grow in number.
One of the things that has been a struggle in comics for the last era or two is that a hero can’t realistically maintain a secret identity. Ollie (Stephen Amell) needs allies and with that comes trust. So, we went from Diggle (David Ramsey), in the first season to Diggle and Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) by season’s end. This year, Roy Harper (Colton Haynes), Canary (Caity Lotz), and Laurel (Katie Cassidy) have come to know Ollie’s alter ego. Argus’ Amanda Waller (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) somehow knows, too. Heck, even newcomer Barry Allen (Grant Gustin), visiting from Central City, knows the truth. So, it’s telling that as the season ended, the one who still doesn’t know, his sister Thea (Willa Holland), is the one to vanish, a thread left unknotted until this fall.
The show has also nicely plundered Batman’s resources as Huntress (Jessica De Gouw) returned and we met Nyssa al Ghul (Katrina Law), setting up this coming season’s arrival of Ra’s al Ghul himself. But first, old business needed addressing and much of the season’s meta arc dealt with Slade Wilson, Deathstroke (Manu Bennett), exacting revenge against Ollie, blaming him for Shado’s (Celina Jade) death and worked with Isabel Rochev (Summer Glau) to take down both Queen Consolidated and the Queen family, which climaxed with the death of Moira (Susanna Thompson), Ollie’s mom. As for Thea, her world was shattered when she learned her true father was Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman), who conveniently returned from the dead.
The episodes stir the pot with verve and alliances rise and fall with long-simmering threads spun out across the weeks and months. We’re even teased with the hint of an Ollie/Felicity romance even while he and Canary got nice and cozy. On the other hand, the cast has grown so large, supporting teams of players in the present and an almost separate collection in the flashbacks, that some shows feel overstuffed, losing focus. While I appreciate the need to spotlight Diggle now and then, bringing in his wife, her connection to Waller, and the formation of the Suicide Squad felt more of a distraction than a strong storyline on its own. Both Thea and Roy were underserved by the scripts this year.
That said, I do want to applaud the two-parter that acts as prelude to this month’s The Flash series, and the way they subtly continued those subplots through the final episode. Speaking of which, the finale was one of the best action episodes of prime time I’ve seen in a long time so kudos to the writers, cast, and stunt performers for making it exciting.
The transfer to high definition is fairly seamless and a joy to watch, accompanied by the strong DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track.
The four-disc set comes with some standard extras, most of which are diverting enough although none are Must See viewing either. We have From Vigilante to Hero (24:00), an examination of the season’s design; The Visual Effects of Arrow (11:00), exploring how the night scenes, explosions, and action is brought to life; and, Wirework: The Impossible Moves of Arrow (10:00), a companion feature focusing on the stunts. There are, of course, Deleted Scenes, culled from “City of Heroes,” “Identity,” “Crucible,” “Keep Your Enemies Closer,” “State v. Queen,” “Three Ghosts,” “Tremors,” “Heir to the Demon,” “Time of Death,” “The Promise,” “Suicide Squad,” “The Man Under the Hood” and “Unthinkable.” And we have the requisite Gag Reel (5:00). Finally, there is edited footage from Arrow: 2013 Comic-Con Panel (26:00).
Increasingly, studios want you to stream or buy your own digital copy of feature films and to entice you, that edition is being made weeks prior to the physical disc being available for purchase. In an effort to direct viewer buying and viewing habits, studios are also shifting review copies from disc to high definition download. My first encounter with this brave new world, ironically enough, comes with 20th Century Home Entertainment’s current release of X-Men: Days of Future Past, the sprawling, epic film from May. The biggest drawback is making certain you have enough hard disc storage for the mammoth file and a set-up that allows you to watch on a huge screen. Lacking that, I watched the film on my 24” external monitor and while the image was crisp and the audio clear enough (although maybe I need to upgrade my speakers); it needs a bigger screen to properly appreciate.
Bryan Singer returned to the franchise and pulled out all the stops, successfully adapting the Chris Claremont/John Byrne story while seamlessly integrating it with the four preceding feature films. He directed the first two while Brett Ratner mishandled X-Men: Last Stand and Matthew Vaughn wonderfully rebooted the franchise with X-Men: First Class.
As we toggle between past, present, and future, we understand that in the 1970s, Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) convinces Congress to fund his Sentinels program to root out mutants, who threaten “our” way of life. Once his program goes live, it grows, morphing with the times, until the future is a dark land of devastation, with the last handful of mutants on the run and losing their battle with extinction. In a final desperate act, Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) uses her powers (in ways that never quite made sense) to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to derail the program. In order to do this, he needs to reconcile Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) with Erik Lenscherr (Michael Fassbender) but first, Magneto needs to be freed from confinement under the Pentagon and to accomplish this, they need help from young mutant Pietro (Evan Peters).
It becomes several races against time as ideologies are heated debated in one era while the Sentinels locate the planet’s last mutants and approach, forcing many a heroic sacrifice to buy Kitty the time she needs to keep Wolverine in the past, protected by Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellan).
The casts are blended fairly well and even though the story may make a civilian’s head throb; it’s a fairly coherent story, well-told thanks to a strong script largely from Simon Kinberg, Singer’s direction, and a cast that is up to the task. It’s nice to see familiar faces such as Halle Berry’s Storm and cameos like Kelsey Grammer’s Beast. Page is under-utilized here, sweating and trembling but given little else to do. As befits his stature in the Marvel Universe, it’s really Wolverine’s story and Jackman is up to the challenge, once more better served in the ensemble than either of his solo films. The other spotlight is on young Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) who is trying to carve her own path which sharply diverges from that of her mentor, Xavier. She becomes the threat that needs stopping, not Trask and Lawrence is deadly and vulnerable at the same time.
The high def version and forthcoming Blu-ray features several nifty extras, starting with an extended Kitchen sequence (6:00) that got trimmed but explores many of the film’s issues and themes as debated between Xavier and mystique with Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and Wolverine mere bystanders. There’s a fun Gag Reel (5:36) and a handful of deleted scenes that should be viewed with Singer’s commentary. (Be warned, just as this became available for sale, it was announced an extended version was to be released next summer, integrating these scenes including the Rogue [Anna Paquin] sub-plot that caused some controversy when dropped.) There are also some nice images from the Trask Industries archives.
It’s the classic time travel question – would you kill a dangerous killer in their crib, before they’ve actually done anything? Well, what is you weren’t sure the baby was going to do anything? What if you were asked to…
KILL THE MOON
By Peter Harness
Directed by Paul Whilmshurst
Clara speaks to the entire Earth – they run the risk of the Earth being destroyed if they don’t kill an innocent being. “The man who normally helps” is nowhere to be found, and a decision must be made. Flashing backwards, we learn that Coal Hill student Courtney Woods has not reacted well to her brief run on the TARDIS. The Doctor told her she “wasn’t special”, a comment she’s taken to heart. Clara asks him to apologize; he instead offers her a chance to be the first woman on the Moon.
Alas, all is not well there. In 2049, the moon has mysteriously gained 1.3 billion tons of extra mass, causing staggering tides on Earth. It turns out the moon is something altogether new to The Doctor’s eyes, and rather than help…he walks away.
This was a very dark episode with a bright ending, only to reveal that light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. I expect we’ll see this story used in argument for certain social issue quite soon now. Fabulous performances all round.
GUEST STAR REPORT – Hermione Norris (Lundvik) is well known to British audiences for many regular TV appearances in series like Spooks and Cold Feet.
Tony Osoba (Duke) – is one of a smallish group of actors who’s appeared in both the new and original run of the series. He had roles in both Destiny of the Daleks and some years later in Dragonfire.
Paul Whilmshurst (director) will be back next week, and will be directing the Christmas episode. He has a long resume of TV directing, both drama and reality/documentary.
Peter Harness (writer) has been writing for British television for nearly a decade now. He wrote and appeared in a TV movie about British comedy legend Frankie Howerd, who was played by Who-lumnus David Walliams.
THE MONSTER FILES – The Moon has been the setting of many Who adventures over the decades. It first threatened the Earth millions of years ago, where the dominant life form of the Earth, who would come to be known as Silurians, feared a monstrous asteroid would crash into the planet. They set themselves up in massive hibernation cities to sleep through the disaster, only for the heavenly body to be trapped by the Earth’s gravity and become the Moon. That change to the delicate balance of the orbital mechanics of the solar system was enough to allow the planet Mondas to break free of its orbit, returning millennia later as The Tenth Planet. There have been many bases on the Moon, built and manned by both human and alien forces. The Cybermen tried to attack one in an appropriately titled episode. It would be used as a penal colony, house River Song’s alma mater, and eventually, we’d haul in four more for additional real estate. Needless to say, there’s never been any mention of it hatching a titanic alien and leaving another one in its place, but that’s the sort of thing that gets forgotten when you’re trying to fight off Draconians.
Doctor Who has had its share of spiders as well, even if in this case they’re just bacteria that resemble spiders, by some mad coincidence. Brought with human explorers in the future, spiders would evolve to control the world of Metebelis III, eventually known as the Planet of the Spiders. The Racnoss were a semi-arachnid race who planned an overthrow of the world, stopped by the able assistance of The Runaway Bride.
BACKGROUND BITS AND BOBS –
SET PIECES – Rather than go for the old reliable stone quarry, the production team traveled to Lanzarote, part of the Canary Islands off Africa, to duplicate the surface of the Moon. It was last used in the Davison adventure Planet of Fire.
I WEAR THE CLOTHES OF THE REGENERATED – Capaldi is wearing David Tennant’s spacesuit from The Satan Pit, a suit which is rapidly becoming the most recycled prop on the show, gaining on that rock used on almost every alien planet in the classic series.
“No being sick and no hanky-panky” – Considering the last time there was…you know, what-not… on the TARDIS, it resulted in River Song, a clear example of a result which caused both happiness and hardship.
“You’ll have to spend a lot of time, shooting me, because I will keep on regenerating” – The Doctor may be bluffing when says he might keep on regenerating forever – he made a similar comment on The Sarah Jane Adventures when he was asked how many times he could do it. But the new energy infusion given him by the Time Lords is something new – it’s not known if it was enough for one, a whole new cycle of twelve, or a potentially infinite number.
“What is wrong with my yo-yo?” – The Doctor used a yo-yo to test gravity force during the Baker years, with the same color yo-yo, yet. I’ve mentioned before that this Doctor is using more gadgets, large and small, to get things done, not just relying on the Sonic Screwdriver, a change I love campaigned for.
“That’s what you do with aliens, isn’t it? Blow them up?” It’s not The Doctor’s primary method, but it’s come up a couple times. Prime Minister Harriet Jones, (Yes, we know who you are) contacted Torchwood to destroy the retreating Sycorax spaceship at the end of The Christmas Invasion. And after Leela recommended it the whole time, The Doctor suddenly “came up with the idea” of blowing up The Invisible Enemy.
“High tide everywhere at once” – Well, no. It’d be tides far higher than normal for parts of the Earth both facing and pointed away from the moon, and calamitous low tides at the sides.
“When I say run…run” – So much fun to see bits of the old Doctors pop up again. That was one of the second Doctor’s catch phrases, like in this clip from Tomb of the Cybermen.
“There are some moments in time that I simply can’t see” This is a new take on the old reliable “Fixed Point”, where crucial points in history exist, chronal tipping points that cannot be changed. But here, rather than just walking away, here he forces three humans to make a choice that will damn the world, either physically, or by making them party to genocide.
“My Gran used to put things on tumblr” There actually is a girl named Courtney Woods with an account on tumblr, and I expect she’s getting an amazing increase in traffic right now. The Doctor Who tumblr community is amazingly vast and creative, featuring animation, art and filk music. It’s neat we’re finally getting a shout out.
“The last time you said that, she turned up on the wrong side of the planet!” – Clara is referring to the events of Cold War, where the TARDIS popped off to the south pole because The Doctor turned on the HADS, or Hostile Action Displacement System.
“There’s some DVDs in the blue bookshelf – just stinck on in the TARDIS console, it’ll bring you to me” There are exactly seventeen DVD titles containing the program that will automatically return the TARDIS to The Doctor’s location. They are the seventeen DVDs owned by Sally Sparrow, as revealed in the classic Blink.
“We didn’t nip out after pudding and kill Hitler” River Song, or rather Mels certainly tried that one time.
“Mind your language, please – there are children present” I count one child. Whoever could The Doctor be referring to in the plural? Patronizing, indeed.
“You made your decision…humanity made its choice” Assuming the vote is the same on the bright side, the Earth chose to kill a beautiful and innocent creature to save themselves. That’s more than a bit similar to the choice the denizens of Britain made when they built the Starship UK in The Beast Below. Considering they made themselves all forget they did it then, maybe that’s a viable explanation why it’s so rarely mentioned in future history.
“Not bad for a girl from Coal Hill School” I for one am perfectly ready for Courtney Woods to come on full time as a companion. We’re seeing her make a massive change in just these two episodes. She’s not well educated, she’s an average kid. And as such is a more perfect avatar for the viewer than any of the adult companions we’ve seen in the entire new series. Companions are often younger in the comics for that reason. It’s likely the extra issues of a minor working on a TV show, especially one as intensive as Doctor Who that precludes such a casting choice, but for a girl for this this is her first professional acting job, Ellis George is more than up for it.
BIG BAD WOLF REPORT – Clara’s arc is once again the only one furthered this week. The blowout argument with The Doctor, combined with the heart-to-heart with Danny, certainly points towards a change of affiliation in the future.
“It’s time to take the stabilizers off your bike” there may be two levels of action happening here. The Doctor is forcing Clara to make a staggering decision. He is also causing a rift in their relationship. What are the odds that this is another attempt to push Clara to safety? It’s plainly obvious that Clara will do everything in her power to help The Doctor – she hung onto the outside of the TARDIS for an eyes-open trip through the time vortex in The Time of the Doctor. She’s already spent an unknown amount of time racing through his timeline, fixing what The Great Intelligence set wrong. Perhaps he knows she deserves a rest, and knows the only way she’d leave is if he all but pushes her away. As here, The Doctor is forcing Clara to make a massive choice.
“You wanna have babies?” Courtney’s teasing mention of Danny is spot on. Assuming he’s not something Clever and surprising from Moffat’s dark evil heart, the budding relationship between Danny and Clara is almost a certainty. There’s not much that could stop it – death, perhaps, or as mentioned, an inability to leave The Doctor.
“I’ve got Grey areas” “Yeah, I noticed” It sure sounds like a hair joke, but on further rumination, it’s pretty clear Clara is talking about the grey areas in The Doctor’s personality. This is an extension of that first question – “Am I a good man?”
That’s the quote from David Copperfield on Clara’s board. Once again, the choices of quotes Clara selects are amazingly prescient.
“I had a really bad day” – Yes, there’s absolutely a very big story to be told here, and there’s still a chance it may not be a good one for Clara and their relationship.
NEXT TIME ON DOCTOR WHO – The Doctor tests the little grey cells. Mummy on the Orient Express, coming this Saturday.
The Boxtrolls is a movie that always felt like enjoyment was just beyond my grasp. It has so many things going on and I never felt like I got quite enough information or context to really appreciate them. This ended up making me feel very old because I probably wouldn’t have gotten caught up on that as a child. Back then, I would have just considered each thing, found it pleasing or displeasing and moved on but now while they’re giving me a cross-dressing villain or an oddball pseudo-murder montage and I’m still thinking about how weird it is that everything in this entire world is somehow cheese-based.
Now that it’s officially autumn, we’re ready to jump right into Halloween. Thankfully, Shout! Factory has just released Spooktacular Pony Tales, a collection of six My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic episodes (along with extras like pumpkin stencils & a sing-a-long!) to help us ease into probably the best holiday ever! Of course, we’d watch Pinkie Pie in a chicken costume any time of year.
Cover via Amazon
It’s easy to throw The Maze Runner in with the rest of the Young Adult fiction boom, and it’s probably mostly true, it is a YA book, it does seem to have made in a response to the money being trucked in by Twilight and The Hunger Games but there’s a world of difference here and much of it centers on having a male character be the center. The Maze Runner has a stronger focus on action and gives much less attention to establishing characters. Perhaps this is serving someone in some demographic but it feels too soft to be a real action movie and too hard to contend with the other YA franchises.
There are only three characters in The Maze Runner that I would need to use more than just “The <blank> Guy” to describe. This isn’t unheard of in movies but it’s a serious problem when the female lead falls in to that category (she’s The Girl Guy) along with almost every ally of Thomas, the hero. There are people who stand by him the whole way and seem to be some of his most trusted friends that I’m not even sure got named in the film. It’s hard to get invested in the climactic battles when the kids being thrust in to harms way feel like 80% red shirts. It’s also a bad sign for a franchise when two of the three characters that feel the most complete die in the first film. They’ve left a lot of heavy lifting for the sequels.
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