Asking the Wrong Questions

This year's fall pilot season is shaping up to be rather muted.  Which, to be fair, is an improvement on the dreck of previous years, but also not much to talk about.  It probably tells you all need to know about the fall pilots of 2016 that there are two different time travel shows-- Timeless and Frequency --and neither of them are worth saying anything about.  Nevertheless, here are a few series, good and bad, that I thought were interesting enough to write about, even if I'm not sure I'll be sticking with all of them. No Tomorrow - Over the last few years, I've come to trust the CW and its programming instincts.  Not only does it air some of my favorite shows-- iZombie , the smartest superhero show on TV; Jane the Virgin , still going strong and finding real drama at the heart of cheesy soap opera plot twists; Crazy Ex-Girlfriend , one of the funniest, most original, most heartbreaking shows in existence--but its DC superhero block is easily the most rock-soli...

For the last couple of weeks I've been trying to put into words just why I've found the most recent and just-concluded season of Doctor Who so underwhelming.  What's standing in my way is the fact that somewhere around the second season I lost the ability to think or write critically about the show.  Oh, I've produced the occasional piece , but what they've all had in common was an emphasis on a single character or plot arc that I could get a handle on, while the show as a whole seemed to elude my grasp.  From the moment it exploded onto our screens in 2005, New Who 's defining characteristic seemed to be its cheerful and relentless determination to ignore all the rules of good writing in favor of spectacle and, as Jackson Lake so accurately put it in "The Next Doctor," wonderful nonsense.  Russell T. Davies came out and said that he wasn't interested in coherent plots or nuanced characterization or subtle moments, that what he wanted was to eli...

And thus, the Russell T. Davies era ends. Well, there are three more Davies-penned specials (the teaser for the 2008 Christmas special is already circulating) in the tube, but both the evidence of years past and the fact that in the fourth season finale Davies obviously worked hard to give Steven Moffat the closest thing possible, on a show with four decades of continuity, to a fresh start suggest that these will be largely self-contained regurgitations of past stories, and also not very good. So, really, the Davies era wraps up with Saturday's episode, "Journey's End," and like him or hate him, esteem his abilities as a writer and producer or despise them, there is no denying that this was an era, with its own tone and character, its own themes and focal points, its own recurring settings and characters, now brought to a resounding and definite close. So really, there are three endings we could talk about: the episode, the season, and the four seasons that make up ...

The BBC press office reports : Steven Moffat will succeed Russell T Davies as Lead Writer and Executive Producer of the fifth series of Doctor Who, which will broadcast on BBC One in 2010. While this is obviously good news, I think it's a good idea not to let expectations run too high.  Though the plotting of all of Moffat's episodes thus far has been strong, I still haven't forgotten the spectacular implosion of Jekyll in its second half, in which Moffat's strong characters stood around spouting his incredibly clever and funny dialogue while nonsense of  Torchwood levels happened to and around them.  It's also worth remembering that it's one thing to write a standout episode in a season, and quite another to oversee the entire season.  Though I'm sure that this is a step in the right direction for Who , we shouldn't expect the result to be thirteen weeks of "Blink." And at any rate, there's the latter half of season four (in which I have...

I watched three major SF-related shows this weekend, and I was hoping to get a blog post out of at least one of them, but instead I find myself with very little to say. So, I'm going to smoosh all three reactions into a single catch-all post, and hope that there's something more substantial for me to write about in the pipeline. (That said, I'm anticipating a bit of quiet around these parts during April.) Battlestar Galactica , "He That Believeth in Me" - That was surprisingly enjoyable. The first act plays to the show's greatest strength--cool and intense space battles--and wraps up in one hell of an interesting way which makes one of my favorite characters even more interesting, and might even get me over my dubiousness about the identities of the Cylons revealed in "Crossroads." The rest of the episode is also strong, as the show finally starts paying attention to an issue that should have started cropping up in discussions and conversations i...

Over at Strange Horizons , Adam Roberts reviews Doctor Who 's third season. The first half of the review focuses on the season-ending three-parter, which Roberts criticizes for its myriad plotting malfunctions while ultimately concluding that This question of puerility is, of course, the key one. As the Dobby-version of the Doctor was placed in a cage, I found myself wondering whether this was a deliberate allusion to the Sybil in Petronius's Satyricon, immortal but continually ageing, eventually so shrunken that she was kept in a bottle (this is the passage Eliot uses as the epigraph to The Waste Land: and when the boys come to ask her "what do you want?" she replies "I want to die"). But by the end of the episode it was clear that Davies was aiming at a lower age group. And that gave me pause. Had I so overwritten my experience of Who with pretentious adult expectations that any childishness in the show had become intolerable to me? Was I really criticis...

There are some good reasons to draw comparisons between the recently completed Doctor Who two-parter, "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood", and Steven Moffat's first season story "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances," and not simply because the latter is the last time Who was as good as it's been these last two weeks. As Iain Clark points out in this entry on "The Family of Blood", "this two-parter does for World War One what 'The Empty Child'/'The Doctor Dances' did for World War 2: make an abstract historical event into a real and relevant thing for a young generation of viewers." The comparison seems particularly apt when one notes the two stories' emotional arcs. "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" is a story that emerges from the bleakest despair into the most miraculous, unexpected hope and redemption. "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood" tells an o...

In general, I like. I do, however, wish that the episode had been a little more subtle in its attempts to make us like the character, or at least not recruited the Doctor for the job. I preferred the approach taken in "Rose," in which the Doctor is almost entirely dismissive of Rose even as we learn to appreciate her. With Martha, there was a palpable sense of the writers checking items off a list of good companion attributes--observant, inquisitive, smart, cool under pressure, willing to step up in a time of crisis--and making sure we noted each one by having the Doctor comment or at least react to them. Towards the end, it felt a little as though Martha's wonderfulness was being rammed down our throats, which is something that Rose managed to avoid for most of the first season. I am, however, surprised at the reactions calling Martha a beacon of calm and rationality, specifically in contrast to Rose. I'm not sure I know which Rose most of these commenters are talkin...

Scroll down to the bottom of the interview for some Doctor Who casting news almost as exciting as Christopher Eccleston's guest role on Heroes . ( Via .)

Under Torch Wood: A Parody for Voices Separate from the government, outside the police, beyond the United Nations, independent of the judiciary, not voting in council elections, distinct from the Brownies, non-members of the AA, think iPods are rubbish, cancelled the milk, no TV licence. The conclusion seems spot-on, too. ( Via )

When I wrote about Russell T. Davies' 2003 miniseries, The Second Coming , I remarked that Davies and star Christopher Eccleston carried over a great many of the lead character's mannerisms and attitudes when they created the character of the ninth Doctor. Which, at the time, was rather amusing. Now that I've seen Davies' 2005 mini, Casanova (pretty good. Very funny. Not nearly as smart or as moving as The Second Coming , but then, what is?), starring David Tennant, I'm starting to worry. You see, Tennant's Casanova is the tenth Doctor. It's not just a matter of the actor repeating some physical tics (and anyway, I've seen Tennant in one or two other things and, while he many not have the greatest range in recorded history, he's certainly got more than one character in him). When Tennant reads his lines, you can see him wearing a pin-striped suit instead of gaudy, quasi-period dress. And those lines are thoroughly Doctor-ish: Casanova: I...

It's Doctor Who week at Strange Horizons ! The reviews section is dedicated to contemplations of the show's second season, kicking off today with Iain Clark's Doctor Who and the Nostalgia Factor , which discusses "School Reunion" and companions past and present. Tomorrow, Tim Phipps will be chiming in with his take on "Love & Monsters" and the fannish mindset, and on Wednesday it'll my turn to offer some observations on the season finale. Graham Sleight will review the season as a whole on Thursday. New reviews will go live every day at SH's reviews page --enjoy.

With impeccable timing, Television Without Pity has decided to recap The Second Coming ( part 1 is up, part 2 is presumably upcoming). The bad news is that they gave the job to Jacob; the good news, that for something by Jacob the recap is actually quite readable. There's none of the fawning adoration that made me drop his Battlestar Galactica recaps, and because The Second Coming wasn't primarily intended to be funny, he can't wring all the fun out of it the way he does with Doctor Who and Farscape . He's also being relatively succinct (20 pages for a 90 minute show, when he usually does more for 45-minute episodes), which means that instances of using as many words as possible to make the fucking obvious seem profound are kept to a bare minimum. Still not funny, though.

"You should see Russell T. Davies' The Second Coming ," Niall Harrison told me. "It's about a man who thinks he's the second coming of Christ, and he really is. It's good." "Erm." I said. My reservations had something to do with the obvious ridiculousness of the premise, but also with my general distaste for the way mainstream, secular fiction tends to treat religion and the idea of God. At the far ends of the spectrum are those whose work is primarily intended to preach and convert--the Tim LaHayes and Philip Pullmans--and they are easily dismissed. At the center, however, one more of than not discovers a wishy-washy, feelgood approach that I, for one, find more dispiriting than any amount of religious or anti-religious fanaticism. Joan of Arcadia is a good example--it posited a God so benign, so pleasant , that he or she seriously had nothing better to do than help a teenage girl forge better relationships with her parents and teach he...

I was pointed in the direction of Andrew Rilstone's blog during a discussion about the Extended Editions of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. If Rilstone's keen wit and crisp prose weren't enough to keep me coming back for more, there was the fact that, while his reactions to the individual films were largely the same as mine, his ultimate feelings about them were the complete opposite. I've made a rather thorough review of Andrew's blog (and his older website ) since then, and have discovered in him a rare treasure--a person with whom it a genuine joy to disagree. Although Andrew's perspective is frequently more harshly fannish than my own (how, for example, can you damn Peter Jackson's films and praise The Phantom Menace ?), he is such a perceptive and insightful writer that I always walk away from his posts with something new to think about. Andrew is also largely the reason I ended up watching the new incarnation of Doctor Who . You may h...