We just finished watching the last chapter of Doctor Who, aired last Saturday, apparently. Other times I have mentioned this series, but I have never explained much about it...
Doctor Who is an English series, very VERY old one, that started as a way to teach some science things to kids, mixed with fiction. It evolved quite rapidly into a full science-fiction series with different plots, the teaching part mostly forgotten. The tone varied, and even if considered for kids most of the time, there were more adult themes thrown into the mix.
We're talking about lots of years and changes here, it started in 1963 and continued for a long time. In 1989, a big break in the series started, and it was not continued until 2005, with a movie in the middle of it, in 1996.
They got away with all this changes by the fact that the Doctor, the main character, is an alien with human form, that can regenerate when about to die. Using smart applications of that theory, they have changed the actor playing him all along these years. The Doctor is also accompanied by a "Companion", usually a girl, although later years there has been some more variety. To change companions, they just need to show that one of them got tired from travelling with him, and then the Doctor just finds another one (after some brooding). In some cases the companion has accidents and dies or is lost somewhere, but well, the end result is that they change.
The important thing, of course, is that the Doctor travels in a spaceship that is also a time machine (in the shape of a blue police box), so they can explore other planets and universes, the future, the past, even the present, and in some extreme cases, complete other dimensions.
Depending on the writer, things try to make more sense or less, from a scientific point of view, but it always tends to the "less sense", just for the fun of it.
We started watching it after the big break happened, and we have only watched the chapters emitted after 2005. Alba recommended them, and we really enjoyed them^^.
Anyway, the main writer for the first new seasons after 2005 had been Russel T. Davies. The plots had been complex and interesting, plenty of times with some common theme present in most of the season's chapters.
The actors playing the Doctor in the first 4 new seasons were Christopher Ecclestone and David Tennant. Tennant in particular has done an incredible job, and is one of the best Doctors ever.
Of course, being the main writer does not mean you write all the chapters, there were other writers. One of these writers was Steven Moffat, a fan of the series since he was a kid, that has done work as the writer of other successful series. In the first 4 seasons, Moffat wrote one or two chapters in each of them. And they were awesome. Truly incredible chapters, scary, creepy, interesting, touching, funny chapters, all at the same time.
The chapters are The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead
.
Watch them, even if you're not going to watch the rest of the series. Specially, watch Blink.
When Davies decided to end his period and leave it to someone else, that someone else was going to be Steven Moffat. The actor playing the Doctor would change and Tennant would leave too, but the fact that Moffat would take charge promised to be awesome.
The new Doctor ended up being Matt Smith, and even if not as good as Tennant, his doctor is quite interesting too, more goofy and in another world, less serious, but still giving a nice touch to it.
Moffat, however, was a disappointment.
His plots are usually much more simplistic than Davies, and make much less sense (when he starts getting into time travel, the amount of bullshit that doesn't make any sense with everything established beforehand is astounding). He made some awesome chapters before, but when he got free rule over it, lots of chapters resemble pure fan fiction, where he crams 6 different alien species (that appeared in the old series that he watched as a child), without making any sense of why they are here or why they're fighting with or against the Doctor.
Moffat is a fan of not explaining things too much, but you need to draw the line somewhere, and if you killed an entire dangerous alien species, and/or locked it inside some other dimension, when they appear again without further explanation it feels kind of...cheap. As I said, like cheap harry potter fan-fiction, where all of a sudden Hermione falls in love with Draco, logic be damned.
That's half of the chapters...the other half, the problem is another one. In the other half of the chapters, where things make sense, the world feels...empty. Davies was an specialist of showing probable real-life consequences of some alien attack over London (for example, people leaving London for Christmas because every previous one some dangerous thing was happening in there). It's little things that help to create a world that has internal workings and makes sense.
Terry Pratchett, I believe has mentioned several times that the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork, that he created, makes sense because you can imagine it working even when the heroes are not around. It has a life of its own, it's not only a background scenario where plot happens.
Moffat missed precisely that for a very long time, and there were lots of chapters that felt as if there was no other world population than the 6 characters shown in screen....the feeling was that something was weird in that world, it was not really logic, it was half empty.
The last 2 seasons where Moffat has participated had these big problems, the plot was going all around the place, made little sense, introduced 5 minutes-characters as some kind of star guest and other similar bullshit.
There were good chapters (for example, I liked a lot The Doctor's Wife, done by Neil Gaiman, a writer of books that I really like), but the overall feeling was a disappointment.
However, even with problems, we could enjoy chapters, it's just that not as much as before...and the two-three companions of these 2 season managed to become interesting and nice. After a while, the companions had a life that made sense, and this added much-needed logic to the world.
Anyway, we've noticed that the chapters are getting better, and I really enjoyed this last chapter.
The current season, that stopped months ago and just now is being continued, has had already 2-3 chapters where the "world half-empty" feeling has disappeared. Maybe it's a little thing, but with these chapters, I finally got the feeling that we were in the same universe as the one done by Davies. There was a retarded chapter too (Moffat doesn't understand time travel at all sometimes, or contradicts everything we've seen, including things he has said), but overall things seem to have improved, and it's getting back to a very interesting place...
We'll see how the next chapter goes^^
Showing posts with label Doctor Who. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Doctor Who. Show all posts
Tuesday, 2 April 2013
Thursday, 28 June 2012
Humans are always special
I am currently playing Mass Effect 3, and I'm probably one of the last people who has not seen the ending yet, even if I have read enough about it to know what's going to happen.
Before reaching the ending, Mass Effect 3 feels like a natural extension of 1 and 2, just taking the plot and making it even more epic than before. I've read in TvTropes that the first game is based on science-fiction in the eighties, and the second follows more closely the philosophy of the nineties. This trend would proceed then to the third one, with an apocalyptic setting similar to Battlestar Galactica. I like the game so far, and I know that I can decide to ignore the ending and I will get a nice story that spans long hours of gameplay. However, there are things that bother me, of course.
One of these things, that appears heavily in other games, books, movies, etc., is the fact that humans are always "special". In Mass Effect, for starters, you will always be a human. You will always be in the military, as some kind of elite soldier, and all your actions will benefit or not impact humanity. Here one can argue that, for example, saving the Krogans may cause the extinction of humanity in the future, but the point here is that this is a long term situation that may or may not happen.
In the games there is several "specieist" characters, but you cannot use a renegade option to disagree with them. Sure, Mass Effects is an "RPG-for-Dummies", but I feel there's a wide range of options that are just never presented to the player. And the central idea everywhere is what I commented, humans are special.
When creating a science-fiction world, the writers had the chance to explore all these different cultures, completely alien to us....but humans are somehow better in lots of ways, even if it doesn't make much sense. They get access to the galaxy government sooner than other species, they manage to impress all the rest with their "adaptability"(because the Krogans clearly have trouble to adapt, for example), the bad guys target them because of their "bigger genetic diversity"(somehow more diverse than the Asari, a species that actually takes genetic information from other species and adds it to its own), and so on.....
It's a little detail maybe since a big part of the game, specially if you play the paragon route, is to insist on the idea that you should respect and accept each species with their differences and work together. But this detail always bothers me, because it invokes the "white male old producer" image as the force behind it. By that I mean that this, in my opinion, shows that the writers were forced to make sure humans were special, because the producers of the game wanted protagonists that would be idealised versions of themselves. Therefore, they wanted white, male and more or less young humans, and the humans had to be the special ones, the protagonists. It seems that they expect that there's no other way to relate to the protagonist if the protagonist does not comply with these specifications.
There's a chapter of Doctor Who that reminds me of that too. Doctor Who in general treats humans in a very special way, since the Doctor goes to great lengths to save them from the current threat, while sometimes other species are more easily sacrificed. But there was one episode with the 11th doctor that was specially bad in that sense.... The double episode where a group of humans drills too deep, and find a dormant species of human-lizards, that were the original inhabitants of earth. In this chapter, the lizards attack and capture some of the humans, but it's the humans who actually kill one of the lizards first. With any other species, the Doctor would condemn them for this, and make war against them. In this case, the human is forgiven, and the lizards are forced to keep dormant, because they cannot coexist well in this time and age.
I feel sometimes we're too proud of ourselves, and plenty of works of fiction cannot achieve the idea of maybe not considering ourselves so special. With so many attention to the humans, chances are lost to explore other fictional species, and that's really a shame.
Of course there are examples of this being exactly the opposite, like in the Chanur Saga, But in the most popular works, it's harder to find this brave approach of putting us in a secondary plane. And I think it's a great missed opportunity to make science-fiction more diverse, specially in games and movies...
Before reaching the ending, Mass Effect 3 feels like a natural extension of 1 and 2, just taking the plot and making it even more epic than before. I've read in TvTropes that the first game is based on science-fiction in the eighties, and the second follows more closely the philosophy of the nineties. This trend would proceed then to the third one, with an apocalyptic setting similar to Battlestar Galactica. I like the game so far, and I know that I can decide to ignore the ending and I will get a nice story that spans long hours of gameplay. However, there are things that bother me, of course.
One of these things, that appears heavily in other games, books, movies, etc., is the fact that humans are always "special". In Mass Effect, for starters, you will always be a human. You will always be in the military, as some kind of elite soldier, and all your actions will benefit or not impact humanity. Here one can argue that, for example, saving the Krogans may cause the extinction of humanity in the future, but the point here is that this is a long term situation that may or may not happen.
In the games there is several "specieist" characters, but you cannot use a renegade option to disagree with them. Sure, Mass Effects is an "RPG-for-Dummies", but I feel there's a wide range of options that are just never presented to the player. And the central idea everywhere is what I commented, humans are special.
When creating a science-fiction world, the writers had the chance to explore all these different cultures, completely alien to us....but humans are somehow better in lots of ways, even if it doesn't make much sense. They get access to the galaxy government sooner than other species, they manage to impress all the rest with their "adaptability"(because the Krogans clearly have trouble to adapt, for example), the bad guys target them because of their "bigger genetic diversity"(somehow more diverse than the Asari, a species that actually takes genetic information from other species and adds it to its own), and so on.....
It's a little detail maybe since a big part of the game, specially if you play the paragon route, is to insist on the idea that you should respect and accept each species with their differences and work together. But this detail always bothers me, because it invokes the "white male old producer" image as the force behind it. By that I mean that this, in my opinion, shows that the writers were forced to make sure humans were special, because the producers of the game wanted protagonists that would be idealised versions of themselves. Therefore, they wanted white, male and more or less young humans, and the humans had to be the special ones, the protagonists. It seems that they expect that there's no other way to relate to the protagonist if the protagonist does not comply with these specifications.
There's a chapter of Doctor Who that reminds me of that too. Doctor Who in general treats humans in a very special way, since the Doctor goes to great lengths to save them from the current threat, while sometimes other species are more easily sacrificed. But there was one episode with the 11th doctor that was specially bad in that sense.... The double episode where a group of humans drills too deep, and find a dormant species of human-lizards, that were the original inhabitants of earth. In this chapter, the lizards attack and capture some of the humans, but it's the humans who actually kill one of the lizards first. With any other species, the Doctor would condemn them for this, and make war against them. In this case, the human is forgiven, and the lizards are forced to keep dormant, because they cannot coexist well in this time and age.
I feel sometimes we're too proud of ourselves, and plenty of works of fiction cannot achieve the idea of maybe not considering ourselves so special. With so many attention to the humans, chances are lost to explore other fictional species, and that's really a shame.
Of course there are examples of this being exactly the opposite, like in the Chanur Saga, But in the most popular works, it's harder to find this brave approach of putting us in a secondary plane. And I think it's a great missed opportunity to make science-fiction more diverse, specially in games and movies...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)