If you object to Batman, you object to joy.

It’s an interesting time to be a Torchwood fan. First of all, you have to be able to watch the show past that Cyberwoman episode. Which means you have to spend some time defending the show from the people who couldn’t watch past that episode. You also have to find some way to talk about how you’re glad that the show found a way to put a gay relationship in the foreground of a sci-fi action drama without sounding like an obsessive shipper who only watches the show as fodder for slash-fic stories.

Which all made the meltdown over the third series, broadcast over five nights as a mini-series, so interesting. Given it’s biggest audience and biggest venue yet, the show performed very well and attracted critical acclaim.
And fans raged.

As for the praise, it was well deserved. “Children of Earth” was a fantastically plotted, amazingly acted television event. A frequent point of criticism for the series is that, while it aspires to mature story-telling and was presented as a more “adult” take on Doctor Who, producers and writers seemed to think that all you needed to make a sci-fi series mature was add in lots of swearing, violence and sex. It’s a partly valid complaint, and the unevenness of the first season is testament to that. But by the second series most of the tonal problems had worked themselves out and the show was able to balance a sophistication in story and character with a self-deprecating sense of humor. That frequently focused on sex. This third series continued that evolution even more, and it’s probably telling that shortening the series to one story told over multiple episodes allowed for a more carefully crafted and thoughtful approach to the series than the need to get out thirteen weeks worth of episodes out the door.

The regular cast do a remarkable job, with Gareth David-Lloyd in particular turning in a excellent performance, and Eve Myles stepping up and showing us a Gwen that wasn’t quite always there in previous seasons but comes to the fore remarkably as well. The supporting cast, particularly Peter Capaldi as ill-fated civil servant John Frobisher, do excellent jobs as well. It’s a terribly well-acted show, and writers Russell T. Davies, James Moran and John Fay should be congratulated for giving such meaty roles for strong actors. If there is a fault to be found with the show, it’s in the rather laggy pacing, particularly in “Day Five”, which frequently felt like a thirty-minute story padded out to sixty.

There are some nice nods to the wider universe the show appears in as well, with Gwen making a fairly convincing case as to why, in certain times of deep crisis, the Doctor doesn’t appear on Earth. It’s a telling indictment, since for those who have been watching the new series of Doctor Who, a significant part of the problem faced here can be traced back to the Doctor upsetting history by removing Harriet Jones from power. And, of course, even if it is slightly selfish praise, it is nice to see a big, mainstream, action sci-fi show headlined by an openly gay man that places one of its heroic leads in a same-sex relationship.

And now, for those of you wishing to avoid spoilers, don’t read past the uncomfortable looking gentleman…

Read the rest of this entry »

Lately, a lot of the chatter amongst Doctor Who fandom has been the possibility of a Who feature-film entering into development. I’ve found it very entertaining, as if anyone should know that there is a world of difference between saying a film is “being developed” and “coming out soon”, it’s Doctor Who fans. And yet, the bulk of online reactions seem to be from people operating under the assumption that the film is a done deal. Which, of course, leads to Who fans making decidedly definitive statements about what a Who film absolutely must or must not be.

One popular theory is that the film would be a continuation of the story about the half-human Doctor and Rose in the parallel world, because this wouldn’t cause any contradictions with television continuity. That this only leads to other fans complaining that such a film wouldn’t “count” because it doesn’t feature the “real” Doctor leads to amusing shouting matches, but not much else. A larger problem, as I see it, is that Billie Piper, charming though she may be, is not exactly a big name in the United States. And that’s the larger problem with any fan discussion of a Who film; fans don’t seem to want to take into consideration that the United States is a very different country from Great Britain.

Let’s be blunt here: a Doctor Who film is unlikely to get made without American money. Which means American input. It also means, by necessity, a story that acts as a fresh start for a new audience of film-goers, many of whom will probably never have heard of Doctor Who. That’s just simple fiscal and demographic reality. Compromises must be made to reach an audience larger than British television viewers who don’t care for reality competitions. If Who fans are very lucky, we might reasonably expect that David Tennant will play the Doctor, as anyone with only vague familiarity with the show probably associates his face at least with the role. But beyond that, it seems unlikely that any other cast members of the television show would make it into an American-financed film; they simply don’t have the recognition. The most probable outcome would be for a new companion to be cast, either an affordable known quantity or a cheap up-and-comer.

If the producers of a film version want to have any kind of connection to the current television series, that might actually be the most sensible approach to take anyway. A Who film has to introduce the entire concept of the show to an American audience. That means, to borrow metaphors from the last four years, that a movie would not follow the pattern of, say, “New Earth” or “Partners in Crime.” A film’s structure would probably have to follow something like “Rose” or “Smith and Jones” as a model: introduce us to the companion first, make us care about her, and then have the Doctor enter her world. The companion, at best, is more than simply someone for the Doctor to exposition at; she’s the view-point character that allows the audience to identify with what they’re seeing on screen. Someone with potential global appeal (and probably an American accent) would be the best choice for the role.

That is, of course, assuming that any kind of connection to the television series would be desired. Given the success of Star Trek and the drubbing of Terminator: Salvation, it’s understandable that the word du jour in Los Angeles is “reboot.” In such a climate, a Peter Cushing-style Who film could be very likely. Take the core concepts of the show (time and space travel, a ship that is bigger on the inside than the outside, and the roles of the Doctor and the companion) and toss everything else out in the name of narrative simplicity. As much as purist Who fans would wail, they are only a very small percentage of the total global film-going population, and divorcing the film of all that fan-baggage could easily be seen as a good thing. After all, fan anger over the “rape” of Deadpool in the Wolverine film, and the loud disapprobation of online fans over the film in general, does not appear to have hurt it at all financially (a fact more fans should probably take to heart and likely won’t).

In any case, if a Doctor Who film gets made, and that’s a pretty damn big “if”, what we’re likely to see is something between what we think we want to see as Who fans and our worst nightmares:

DAVROS

So, Doctor Who, once again we see that there is nothing in this space-universe that you can have that I cannot take away. Now, pitiful fool, if you value the life of your companion, you will toss me the X-TARDIS space-keys or I shall kill her slowly at the hands of my minions, the Al-Daleks.

BREASTINA

Don’t do it, Doctor Who! My life isn’t as important as yours! I’m just a former space-whore trying to turn her life around! You are the last of the X-Lords! Only you can stop the Al-Daleks!

DOCTOR WHO

Baby, the death of all the other Xtreme Lords would have been for nothing if I let an ass as fine as yours get wasted by this queer. K-9, get your metal rear end over here and toss me my Sonic 9 Mili-Meter.

K-9

Yeah, baby! Now we’re going to see some serious ball-busting!

DOCTOR WHO

Eat Sonic Lead, Davros.

[DOCTOR WHO shoots DAVROS. DAVROS and the Al-Daleks explode.]

BREASTINA

Doctor Who, you saved me! How can I ever repay you?

DOCTOR WHO

I think you know how. Just do that thing with your tongues again this time.

K-9

Yeah, baby! The X-TARDIS is going to be rocking tonight!

[Cue end credits and Nickelback song]

_{“Breastina” © 2009 Mike Sterling and is used by permission.}

Joss Whedon’s Star Trek

“Oh, Uhura, thanks to your lingerie kung-fu, we’ve managed to defeat the villains!”
“Yes, and you are so beautiful that Nero has decided to become a good guy in hopes of wooing you.”
“Boo-hoo, it’s so hard being a perky ingenue, no-one understands me!”

Tom Clancy’s Star Trek

“Captain the Muslims Klingons are aiming their suspiciously phallic weapons at our ship.”
“Dammit, Spock, if only the Democrats Federation hadn’t forced us to stop monitoring their sub-space communications! We’d have been prepared for this!”

Dan Brown’s Star Trek

“Mr. Spock, I’ve been staring at this holo-image of the Mona Lisa, and I believe it contains valuable clues as to the true parentage of an obscure historical figure. We must abandon our current mission and investigate this matter thorougly!”

J.K. Rowling’s Star Trek

“Captain Kirk, Starfleet Command finds your actions irresponsible, dangerous, and in violation of the Prime Directive. But since you’re so special, here’s a present.”

P.G. Wodehouse’s Star Trek

“This business with Spock and the Ponn Farr, you know. Bally rummy. I was trotting down the deck with Leonard “Bones” McCoy, and everything seemed to be all boomps-a-daisy. As I may have mentioned once or twice before in these memoirs of mine, whenever Spock was around, young Nurse Christine “Biffy” Chapel had a bit of a birds-tweeting around her head expression, but for Spock there was not even a touch of the old hey-nonny-nonny and a hot-cha-cha.”

Geoff Johns’ Star Trek

“Captain Pike, you’re back!”

Roy Thomas’ Star Trek

“Captain Pike, you’re back!”
“And it turns out I’m your long-lost cousin, Jim!”

Fanfic Writer’s Star Trek

Old Spock gazed at Young Spock through rheumy, heavy-lidded eyes. One eyebrow suddenly cocked upward.

“Forgive me, Young Spock,” said Old Spock, “for I know this is a thought most…illogical, but my pursuit of knowledge demands that I must know what it is like…to kiss myself.”

How did Abrams make Star Trek cool again? By jettisoning all the baggage that the kinds of people who read Geek magazine wanted in the movie.

See also:

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’

You know, pretty much as long as I’ve been reading comics, it seems like people have been telling me that Aquaman is a lame character.
And I just don’t see it.

The core concept behind Aquaman makes perfect sense to me. He’s a dude who hangs around under water and occasionally comes up on land to beat the crap out of people. That’s certainly no stupider a concept than “motorcyclist with his head on fire” or “libertarian teenager with an insect allergy.”

It seems to me that the problems that have developed with Aquaman have come along when people decide that the core concept isn’t interesting enough. “Aquaman is too cheerful. Let’s cut off his hand and give him a homeless guy beard and haircut and angst him up a bit” or “Aquaman is too much a traditional super-hero. Let’s give him a magic hand and connect him clumsily to the Arthurian mythos” or “Let’s turn Aquaman into a half-squid wizard and put his soul into a teenage zombie. That’ll simplify his continuity for a new audience.”

Possibly a good approach to a new Aquaman series would be one similar to that taken on the new Batman: The Brave and The Bold cartoon, where Aquaman is quite deliberately an over-the-top “comic-booky” hero. Good natured, everybody’s pal, not the brightest bulb in the bunch, and, oh yeah, he hits people a lot.

So, explain it to me: what is it about Aquaman that’s so allegedly lame?

Kevin’s right, of course.

I wish I could be as determined as Kevin to avoid the film, as Watchmen the comic book is a work I respect tremendously, but between Pete expressing an interest in it, the presence of Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the film, and my own morbid curiosity over just how bad it’s going to be, I’m pretty sure I’m on the hook to see it at some point. Of course, what really fascinates me in that link is the fact that, once again, for stating an opinion Kevin is being raked over the coals by people unable or unwilling to see his point. And that’s funny to me, because Kevin is a hell of a lot more politic about it than I would be.

I mean, let’s all be perfectly honest here: Watchmen the movie is not for comic book fans. It’s for the people who made Paul Blart: Mall Cop the number one film in the country for several weeks. It’s for the people who read The DaVinci Code and patted themselves on the back because they read big, thick books. It’s for people who keep Fox News on the air.

And you can’t blame Kevin, who is in most things a man of taste and discernment, for not wanting to subject himself to a film crafted for that audience. Which begs the question: why would anyone take Watchmen, one of the most important texts in the history of comic books, and turn it into a film aimed squarely at the lowest common denominators of the American public? And that’s when we get to the tragic truth…

Most people didn’t read Watchmen and come away with an indictment of the fetishization of nostalgia. They didn’t read it and find a critique of authoritarian power structures in global politics and how that is mirrored in popular entertainment vigilante fantasies. They didn’t find an examination of the limits of that whole “power and responsibility” thing and how that absolutist notion of morality falls apart when faced with reality. Nor did they find an amazing example of story-telling structure that fully exploits the idiosyncratic nature of the comic book medium to tell a mature story that is, quite literally, only possible within the comic book medium.

No, they found a cynical super-hero beat-’em-up comic with sex and swearing. They skipped the text pieces. They skipped the “boring stuff with the pirate comic.” And they found that if they threw the word “deconstruction” around when discussing the comic, they sounded smart.

And that’s the movie Zack Snyder is giving us:  that shallow, superficial reading of the comic translated to film. I mean, honestly, what else did anyone expect?

• If a film has a comic book “prequel,” the film won’t be any good.
• If a film is primarily advertised in comic books, it won’t be any good.
• The people who complain the loudest about a comic are the ones least likely to have read it.
• Your importance as commentator on the comic book industry is inversely proportional to how important you think you are to the comic book industry.
• The more exposition in a comic written by Grant Morrison, the more people will complain that it doesn’t make any sense.
• The people most concerned about comics being accessible to new readers have been reading them for over twenty years.
• Sales will always be mistaken for quality.
• Every character has at least one fan.
• If every comic book reader who threatened to boycott a publisher’s products actually did so, the comic book industry would collapse overnight.
• Collector’s items aren’t.
• If comic book publishers actually produced the books people say they want, no one would actually buy them.
• Nobody ever “demanded” it.
• The more stringent a character’s “code against killing” the more cavalierly they will break it in a film adaptation.
• If you mostly read Marvel comics, their books are creatively driven, as opposed to the editorially driven books that DC publishes.
• If you mostly read DC comics, their books are creatively driven, as opposed to the editorially driven books that Marvel publishes.
• No matter how stupid and boneheaded a thing a comic book publisher does, someone will defend it.
• They’re called Marvel Zombies for a reason.
• Comics were always better when you were a kid than they are now. If rereading a comic published when you were a kid reveals it to be sub-literate hack-work, well, clearly that one particular issue was the exception that proves the rule.
• The best comics ever written and drawn came out when you were twelve. It’s all been downhill for the industry since then.
• People will complain when publishers don’t give them what they say they want.
• They will complain more when publishers do give them what they say they want.

Further ideas are welcome in the comments.

An ongoing point of discussion with several of my friends and I is: which group of people is more prone to an over-developed sense of entitlement and the kind of narcissistic rage that can only come from an excess of privilege, video game fans or comic book fans? I mean, on the one hand, I’ve never seen comic book fans actually complain about publishers and artists actually expect to be paid for their work, and yet I see video game fans constantly complain that add-ons for video games should be free. But then, on the other hand, I’ve never seen video game fans complain that Nintendo is being disrespectful to them by ignoring their fan-fiction in which Mario is fucking Link.

So I was greatly amused when I found this in an article about the upcoming Watchmen game:

“Noble antihero”? Well, of course he is! If there’s one thing (one thing?) that video game and comic book fans have in common, it’s the inability to recognize that a protagonist may not necessarily be intended as a figure of admiration. That Rorschach is deeply mentally disturbed just makes him even more “bad ass.”